A well-built WordPress site starts with a custom theme that contains only what’s needed—nothing more. This approach allows you to confidently remove old and unused CSS and JavaScript because you understand every line of code in the project.
This matters more than ever because Google PageSpeed scores, SEO performance, and LLM vectorization are all positively correlated with lean, fast-loading sites.
Avoid theme frameworks and, unfortunately, many agency builds that bloat your business site with unnecessary functionality. More code means more bugs and more time wasted on fixes instead of growth.
Strategic Plugin Usage
The best WordPress sites use very few plugins. This creates a faster admin workflow and allows you to enable automatic updates with confidence.
Sites I build typically include just three plugins:
1. A custom functionality plugin for specific features like lead generation flows or BigQuery integration
2. A quality SEO plugin like RankMath
3. Google Authenticator for MFA security
Clean Analytics and Advertising Infrastructure
Your analytics and advertising tags should be organized and well-documented, typically inside Google Tag Manager. The integration with your site needs to be clean and easy to understand, with clear organization inside the tag manager so you know what’s in use and what can be removed. This keeps the site fast, lean, and easier to maintain.
Server-Side Analytics Tracking
This is critical in today’s privacy-focused environment. Server-side analytics tracking allows you to optimize advertising spend for all visitors to your site, including those with privacy protection and ad-blocking tools enabled. Almost all browsers now include these protections by default, and in the future, nearly everyone will be blocking client-side tracking to some degree.
Error and Issue Detection Systems
Automated monitoring is essential for catching problems before they impact users. While commercial solutions exist, I set up custom systems for each site that scan hourly for visual inconsistencies and other issues. There are occasional false positives when CMS changes are made, but getting immediate email notifications helps identify visual problems that might otherwise be buried deep in a site.
Solid Spam Protection
Many sites use Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, and similar plugins for handling submissions. These days I avoid these entirely—they attract spam because their widespread use makes them targets.
Instead, I build custom lead intake forms that use ChatGPT/OpenAI prompts to test each submission and determine whether it’s likely spam. This approach is highly effective. So far I’ve had zero false positives, and costs remain very low by limiting prompt input and output to be precise.
Custom lead generation forms also allow you to create an ideal onboarding flow for your product, which is especially important for online onboarding processes. Thoughtful customer onboarding always results in more leads and business compared to generic forms.
Modern DevOps
Hosting at a specialized WordPress host like Kinsta or WP Engine is the standard, and fortunately many people are already doing this. But what you do with that platform matters equally.
Make sure your site runs the latest PHP 8.4 with all optimizations and security enhancements enabled. Then set up a proper deployment process that quickly and safely deploys code changes, flushes cache at the hosting level, and clears DNS cache through Cloudflare.
Security Through Cloudflare
Whenever possible, I recommend setting up Cloudflare in front of your site for both security and performance. Over the years I’ve worked on high-profile WordPress websites with strong security requirements, and properly configured Cloudflare has protected these sites with 100% reliability for over 12 years.
Make sure you have a DevOps step to clear the Cloudflare cache so you can reliably deploy changes and have them appear immediately.
Strategic AI Integration
This is more strategy than technical aspect, but marketing teams can now use AI APIs to improve site quality and work speed in numerous ways.
One example: an AI tool can scan the web for brand mentions and automatically include them in a press section, complete with screenshots, Open Graph images, and generated summaries.
SEO improvement is another major opportunity. AI can add descriptive alt tags based on actual image content—especially important if you’ve worked with an SEO firm that injected keywords into alt text, which is likely hurting you. AI APIs allow you to do this at scale across your entire site.
The Result: Growth Over Fire Drills
When all of this is done well, your time shifts from fixing problems to driving growth. With a proper minimal framework, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish, and you can work rapidly because nothing stands in your way. You can make changes with confidence that nothing will break.
If you have a serious onboarding flow or your business depends on your website for new leads, these advantages are worth exploring.