Occasional writing on WordPress, performance, Elementor, and the awkward business of freelancing. No hot takes, no 10-tips-to-double-your-blog nonsense. Just honest notes from 8+ years of building sites for other people.
A quiet argument against fixed-price quotes, unpacked with eight years of real client data. Why hourly billing builds trust faster, protects both sides from scope creep, and usually ends up cheaper for the client anyway.
Read the essay →Notes on building fast, maintainable Elementor sites. How to avoid the bloat, when to write custom CSS, and the plugins I actually trust.
A walkthrough of a real performance engagement with the measurements, the fixes, and what moved the needle most for Core Web Vitals.
Tell them when you're not the right fit. Most freelancers take the work anyway. I've learned the hard way that honest rejection builds more long-term trust than a reluctant yes.
Most Elementor sites break down because every page has its own colour, spacing, and type decisions baked into the markup. Here's how to stop that at the source.
Quote requests instead of checkouts. Trade pricing. Approved account workflows. A field guide to the WooCommerce patterns B2C tutorials quietly ignore.
The themes, plugins, hosts, tools, and habits I actually use. Opinionated, battle-tested, and updated every January. No affiliate links.
Estimation is the single most valuable freelance skill nobody talks about. Here's the process I use to hit my estimates within 15% on projects I've never built before.
Subtraction is underrated. A short list of plugins I've stopped installing by default, what replaced them, and why most sites are carrying weight they don't need.
Largest Contentful Paint is the metric most WordPress sites fail. A practical guide to diagnosing it properly without hand-waving about 'optimisation'.
A short email when I publish something new. Usually once or twice a month, sometimes less. No funnel, no tripwire, no upsell sequence. Unsubscribe anytime.