Senior WordPress development for agencies

Pixel-perfect custom blocks, patterns, and themes your editors will love. Complex React/Vue frontends when the build calls for it. Migrations, integrations, and AI features when the big project lands. One senior dev who slots into your workflow on day one.

  • 35+ sites built, redesigned, or maintained for agencies
  • 14 redesigns Figma to finished blocks, patterns, and themes
  • 9 platform integrations SSO & member data — from Fonteva to Dynamics
  • Senior on day one estimates, client meetings, code review, mentoring

The problem

You’ve hired freelancers before. You know how it usually goes.

  • The build comes back “done”, but the blocks fight the editor.

  • The Figma file was treated as a suggestion.

  • Anything past a template tweak gets a shrug, and you end up rewriting half of it in-house.

The fix

Hand me a design file, a legacy database, or an API spec. Get back finished work your team doesn’t have to touch.

Send me a project

Services

What I take off your plate

  1. 01

    Custom themes & blocks from Figma

    Pixel-perfect Gutenberg blocks, patterns, and templates. ACF-driven, built for a frictionless editor experience.

  2. 02

    Complex interactive frontends

    Vue- and React-powered features inside WordPress: filterable resource libraries, event schedule apps with logged-in favoriting, KPI dashboards with peer segmentation, journal issue/article systems, calendars, member portals, and admin interfaces. App-like, without leaving WP.

  3. 03

    Custom plugin development

    Proper hooks/filters architecture, background job queues, polished admin UIs built to be maintained.

  4. 04

    Overflow senior dev capacity

    Divi, Beaver Builder, Elementor, custom and legacy themes (including sites 10–15 years old). Gravity Forms, GA4/GTM event tracking, caching and asset optimization. Maintenance, legacy rescue, estimates, code review.

  5. 05

    Accessibility remediation

    Scans and hands-on fixes on new builds and inherited sites, so compliance becomes a line item you can sell instead of a scramble after launch.

  6. 06

    Data migrations

    Drupal, Joomla, WooCommerce, and legacy WordPress → clean CPTs and taxonomies. Scripted and repeatable, thousands of records per migration. And, when there's no database access, I've scraped the frontend to get it done.

  7. 07

    Integrations

    OAuth SSO with custom-attribute capture and role mapping, AMS/CRM-driven portals (real-time or nightly sync), WP Multisite with SSO-driven per-site provisioning, and third-party APIs with secure proxy architecture so credentials never touch the browser.

  8. 08

    AI features & AWS backends

    Chatbots, AI search, content-to-audio, personalization. Serverless AWS backends when the project outgrows a plugin. Win the AI project you’d otherwise turn down.

Selected work

Proof, not promises

Flagship

AI-Personalized Resource Center

A Vue.js resource directory built into MCAA’s WordPress site. 900+ resources migrated, SearchBlox search, editor-curated rows via ACF, and OpenAI personalization for logged-in members.

Why it matters to you: this is a WordPress build that behaves like an app. Vue frontend, search engine, AI personalization, and still hands full control to the client’s editors. It’s a feature that makes a redesign pitch stand out, delivered white-label.

Detail view

Flagship

AI-Personalized Resource Center

A Vue.js resource directory built into MCAA’s WordPress site. 900+ resources migrated, SearchBlox search, editor-curated rows via ACF, and OpenAI personalization for logged-in members.

  • Vue.js app embedded in WordPress as a custom ACF-configured block. The whole directory is editor-curated, no developer required
  • Custom WordPress REST endpoint builds each SearchBlox query and normalizes the response across formats — streaming video, downloadable video, PDF, multi-format
  • Streaming-service-style landing rows: each runs its own SearchBlox query by taxonomy, or editors hand-pick posts and title the row themselves
  • Extended the SSO flow to capture member attributes at login, then used OpenAI for a vector-based sort of the library per member profile — no manual tagging or rules
  • Full keyword search plus faceted taxonomy filters, combinable for precise results
  • Format-aware cards: stream, download the video, download the PDF, or open a popup listing every available format
  • Custom migration script moved 900+ resources out of the legacy WordPress site

Read the full case study

Multi-Tenant AI Chatbot Platform

A RAG-based AI chatbot product, architected and built as primary developer. 9 client builds across WordPress and Sitefinity, 6 live and 3 in development.

Why it matters to you: this project required going beyond the WordPress ecosystem. Your agency can sell projects with complex, custom built backends, and I can build it, white-label.

Detail view

Case study

Multi-Tenant AI Chatbot Platform

A RAG-based AI chatbot product, architected and built as primary developer. 9 client builds across WordPress and Sitefinity, 6 live and 3 in development.

  • Vue frontend delivered as a WordPress plugin or a standalone CDN script. The same bundle drops into a .NET Sitefinity site, configured entirely through data attributes, no rebuild required
  • Node.js backend on AWS Lambda with DynamoDB, API Gateway, and EventBridge, deployed per-client via Serverless Framework infrastructure-as-code
  • Nightly automated content indexing through WP REST APIs, with per-content-type logic. Events index only future dates and clean themselves up as they pass
  • Largest deployment: AI-enhanced site search plus separate public and private chatbots, with segmented vector-store collections honoring field-level visibility rules. 30,000+ documents indexed
  • Streaming responses cut perceived wait times by 20–30 seconds on long answers. First tokens in 3–4 seconds
  • Client-facing dashboard for monitoring conversations and user feedback

Read the full case study

Text-to-Speech Plugin

Conceived, built, and shipped a text-to-speech plugin on my own initiative. Now running on 6 sites, including the agency's own, with hundreds of posts converted to audio.

Why it matters to you: I identified the opportunity, proposed the solution, and took it from idea to production without needing a detailed spec handed to me. It’s now a deployed feature across multiple client sites.

Detail view

Case study

Text-to-Speech Plugin

Conceived, built, and shipped a text-to-speech plugin on my own initiative. Now running on 6 sites, including the agency's own, with hundreds of posts converted to audio.

  • React-based admin with a bulk-conversion workflow
  • WordPress background job queue so large batches never overload the server
  • Optional auto-convert-on-publish, per post type
  • Lambda backend calling OpenAI’s TTS endpoints

Read the full case study

Engagements

Built for how agencies actually operate

  • White-label by default.

    Your client never needs to know I exist. I work under your brand, in your tools, on your timeline.

  • Flexible engagement.

    Project-based builds, retainers for maintenance and on-call senior review, or overflow capacity by the week.

  • Senior experience.

    Second-most-senior WordPress dev on a four-person team: code review, mentoring, onboarding, estimates, client meetings. Hand me a workstream, not just tickets.

  • Your stack, not mine.

    GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. WP Engine, Kinsta, Pantheon, or EC2. I adapt to your setup, not the other way around.

About

Zak Goldwasser, WordPress developer for agencies

I spent three years as the second-most-senior WordPress developer at a digital agency, where I built, redesigned, or maintained 35+ client sites (about 14 full or partial redesigns) across every major hosting platform and theme builder. That work ran from Figma-to-finished custom blocks and Vue frontends, to Multisite architectures, SSO and third-party integrations, scripted migrations out of Drupal, Joomla, and legacy WordPress, and custom serverless backends in AWS. Now I bring that experience to agencies that need senior WordPress capacity without making another senior hire with particular depth in complex integrations, migrations, and AI-powered features.

If your team is stretched, the backlog is growing, or a project just landed that’s bigger than WordPress usually gets, let’s talk.

Zak Goldwasser

FAQ

The questions that come up first

Do you work white-label?

Yes, that’s the default. Your brand, your client relationships, my code.

Can you work with our existing themes and builders?

Yes. Divi, Beaver Builder, Elementor, custom themes, and legacy codebases (including sites 10–15 years old).

What about WooCommerce?

Not my focus. If your work is commerce-heavy, I’m probably not your dev and I’d rather tell you now. My sweet spot is content-driven sites: editorial, association, nonprofit, B2B.

Do you handle client communication?

If you want me to. I’ve run client meetings and produced estimates for years, so I can be client-facing under your brand — or invisible. Your call.

How do engagements usually start?

A contained first project works well: a custom block or page build, a migration, an integration, or a plugin. From there, we can keep things project-based or move to ongoing overflow or retainer support.

Contact

Have a build, a migration, an integration, or an AI project on your desk?

Send it over. I’ll come back with a straight answer on scope, timeline, and cost.

Contact Email me