My Process
How I Build: Faster, Leaner, and Cheaper
One senior developer, using AI to take the grind out of the build, so you get a fast, custom site in less time and for less money. Here's exactly how that works.
Hull, East Yorkshire · 15+ years · work with me direct
The Old Way Costs You Twice
Most agency sites are built on a heavy theme and a stack of page-builder plugins. That costs you twice. Once up front, because all that assembly takes time you're paying for. And again every month afterwards, because the result is slow, fragile, and needs constant patching.
I build the opposite way. A lean, hand-built site, with AI doing the repetitive work so the build is quicker, and a hard performance budget so the result is genuinely fast. Fewer hours, a better site, lower cost to run.
How a Build Actually Goes
We Agree the Design
We settle the design in Figma first, so you can see exactly what you're getting before a line of code is written.
AI Scaffolds the Components
My own tooling pulls the design straight out of Figma and, with AI, turns it into real, structured page components. The repetitive boilerplate that eats agency hours takes minutes.
I Craft It by Hand
I take that scaffold and finish every component to the design on a lean custom theme. No Elementor, no Divi, no page-builder bloat. This part is still me, not a machine.
Held to a Performance Budget
Every page is measured on a throttled mobile against strict limits. If it's too heavy or too slow, it doesn't ship until it's fixed.
Launch and Prove It
After launch I check it against Google's own tools and real-world data, so the speed is proven, not promised.
What This Means for You
Delivered Sooner
AI clears the repetitive build work, so your site is ready in less calendar time without cutting corners on craft.
Costs Less
Fewer hours on the boring parts, and one senior developer instead of an agency, means a lower bill for a better result.
Genuinely Fast
Speed is a fixed budget I build to, not something bolted on at the end. Your site loads quickly on a real phone.
Less to Break
A lean site with only the plugins you truly need. Less to go wrong, less to patch, less to get hacked.
A Senior Developer
You deal with the person doing the work, with 15+ years behind it. You're not funding juniors learning on your budget.
Yours and Portable
Built in a clean, version-controlled way on standard WordPress. No lock-in to a proprietary builder.
The budget every page has to hit
| Measured on a throttled mobile | Target |
|---|---|
| Google Lighthouse (mobile) | 95+ |
| Largest Contentful Paint | under 2.5s |
| Total CSS (compressed) | under 75KB |
| First-load JavaScript | under 100KB |
| Layout shift (CLS) | under 0.1 |
If a build can't hit these, it doesn't ship until it does.
AI Is a Tool, Not a Shortcut
I want to be straight about where AI fits, because there's a lot of nonsense sold around it. AI speeds up the repetitive parts of a build: scaffolding components, wiring fields, the boilerplate. It doesn't make the decisions. The architecture, the performance discipline and the finish are still mine, and that's exactly why the result is fast and maintainable rather than generic.
In other words, you get the speed and cost of automation with the judgement of a senior developer on top. That's the whole point.
Want a site built this way?
Book a free 30-minute surgery and I'll walk you through how I'd approach your build, what it would take, and what it would cost. No sales pitch.