WordPress & CMS Development Company in London

WordPress covers a lot of ground in London — five distinct builds sit under the same label: a small marketing WordPress build with custom Gutenberg blocks, ACF Pro, three to five templates, and a basic editorial workflow; a mid-market WordPress build with custom theme architecture, ten to twenty templates, integrations (HubSpot or Marketo, Salesforce, GA4, consent management), and accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA; a headless WordPress build with Next.js front-end, WPGraphQL, Vercel deployment, and a Storybook design system; a headless CMS migration from WordPress to Storyblok, Sanity, or Contentful with content modelling, scripted migration, and editor training; or a WooCommerce store anywhere from a simple shop to a multi-region B2B platform. Scope drivers include template count, integration surface, content volume, and accessibility depth. Scoping reflects London agency benchmarks and the actual quality bar Conde Nast or the Guardian would expect.

Depends on the editorial team, the front-end ambition, and the integration surface. WordPress remains the right choice when the editorial team is comfortable in the WordPress admin, the front-end is server-rendered or lightly interactive, and the integration surface is manageable through standard plugins. Headless WordPress (Next.js front-end fetching via WPGraphQL) suits brands that want WordPress editorial familiarity plus modern front-end performance and component reuse. Full headless CMS migration to Storyblok, Sanity, or Contentful suits clients with multi-channel publishing needs (web, mobile app, in-store screens, voice), multi-brand or multi-market content reuse, real-time collaborative editing requirements (Sanity's strength), or compliance pressures that make WordPress plugin sprawl unmanageable. Conde Nast Britain moved Vogue and GQ workflows toward headless because the legacy WordPress stack could not support cross-title content reuse at scale. The Guardian built Composer because no commercial CMS matched newsroom cadence. Your decision is rarely about CMS features and almost always about editorial workflow.

The Equality Act 2010 makes accessibility a legal requirement for all UK service providers, and the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR) make WCAG 2.1 AA mandatory for public sector sites with a documented accessibility statement, with the regulations transitioning to WCAG 2.2 AA. Our engagement includes axe DevTools and Lighthouse automated scans on every component in Storybook, manual screen reader testing with NVDA, VoiceOver, and JAWS, keyboard-only navigation testing, colour contrast verification against WCAG 2.2 success criteria (including the new 2.2 criteria around focus appearance, dragging movements, and consistent help), and a published accessibility statement template aligned with the Government Digital Service model. We default to semantic HTML, ARIA only where semantic HTML cannot carry the meaning, and accessible Gutenberg or Storyblok block libraries. Charity sector clients also get a Fundraising Regulator and Charity Commission review of donation and contact flows.

PECR governs cookies and electronic marketing, and the ICO has explicitly stated since 2023 that reject-all must be as prominent as accept-all on cookie banners, with the 2024 enforcement direction opening action against major UK publishers and retailers. We deploy a documented consent management platform (OneTrust, Cookiebot, Didomi, or for smaller sites Complianz) configured against ICO guidance, wire Google Consent Mode v2 and Meta and TikTok consent signals into Server-Side GTM where the site runs ad-funded or marketing-attributed traffic, and rebuild form submission and email opt-in flows to PECR soft-opt-in or explicit consent standards. We document the lawful basis for every processing activity in a UK GDPR Article 30 record of processing activities, maintain the cookie register in the consent platform with category and purpose, and produce the records the ICO will ask for if you receive a section 142 information notice. We will not deploy a banner that fails ICO guidance even if a stakeholder asks for one that looks like a US-style accept-only modal.

Yes, both directions, and we will tell you honestly which way the migration should run. WooCommerce suits clients with deep WordPress content integration, custom product configurators or B2B pricing logic, or budget constraints that make Shopify Plus's GBP 2,000 plus per month base unattractive. Shopify Plus suits clients with order volumes above 1,000 per day, multi-region storefronts (Shopify Markets handles GBP-EUR-USD-international taxation cleanly), heavy app ecosystem dependence, and the desire to outsource PCI compliance and platform maintenance. We have migrated UK D2C brands in both directions. Migration includes catalogue and inventory data, customer accounts, order history (where lawful and consented under UK GDPR), URL redirect maps to preserve SEO equity (typically 301 redirects with old-to-new mapping documented in the launch runbook), payment provider re-integration (Stripe UK, Klarna UK, Clearpay), and a documented cutover window with rollback. We do not pretend either platform is universally correct.

Any WordPress or headless site that hosts user-to-user communication (comments, forums, user profiles, user-generated articles, reviews) falls within the Online Safety Act 2023's scope as a user-to-user service. Smaller sites typically fall outside Category 1, 2A, and 2B (the categories with the heaviest duties), but illegal content duties and, where relevant, child safety duties apply regardless of size. Our engagement includes an Online Safety Act risk classification, a documented illegal content and child safety risk assessment, content moderation tooling (Akismet for spam, Disqus or Coral for managed comments, Two Hat Sift Ninja for high-volume moderation, or custom transformer-based pipelines), a reporting and complaints workflow accessible from every UGC surface, and the transparency report scaffolding Ofcom will require if your service ever scales into a higher category. For most marketing sites the answer is to switch off public comments or move them to a managed service, and we will tell you that directly rather than billing for moderation infrastructure you do not need.

For managed WordPress, we default to Kinsta (Finnish company, with UK data centre coverage and excellent UK support response times), WP Engine (UK presence, strong for high-traffic editorial), or Pantheon (US-headquartered but with UK and EU region options) depending on team familiarity and budget. For self-managed WordPress, AWS eu-west-2 (London) with EC2 plus RDS Aurora MySQL plus ElastiCache Redis plus EFS for media, fronted by Cloudflare, gives the best price-performance for high-traffic UK sites. For headless WordPress, Vercel or Netlify on UK or EU edge with WPGraphQL behind Kinsta or WP Engine works cleanly. For headless CMS (Storyblok, Sanity, Contentful), hosting is the platform's problem and you choose front-end hosting (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, or self-hosted on AWS eu-west-2). Cloudflare sits in front of almost everything we ship for caching, WAF, image optimisation, and bot mitigation. We do not recommend US-only hosting for UK editorial brands because latency to UK readers matters more than the marginal cost saving.

A small marketing WordPress build runs six to ten weeks from kickoff to launch. A mid-market WordPress build with custom Gutenberg blocks, integrations, and WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility runs twelve to twenty weeks. A headless WordPress build with Next.js front-end and Storybook design system runs sixteen to twenty-eight weeks. A headless CMS migration from legacy WordPress to Storyblok or Sanity runs sixteen to thirty weeks depending on content volume and editorial complexity. A WooCommerce or Shopify Plus build runs twelve to thirty weeks depending on catalogue size, integration surface, and internationalisation. Editorial training and a 30-day post-launch hypercare window are always included in our timeline, not appended as a separate engagement. We ship to milestones and we will tell you up front when a target launch window is unrealistic against the editorial team's capacity to UAT, approve content, and rehearse the cutover.