Expert WordPress Developer Needed

We are launching a premium, high-end luxury wellness and booking agency based in Central London (Zone 1). We are looking for an expert WordPress developer to help us build a completely custom, lightweight and blazing-fast website. Our primary goal is to outperform established competitors in London on website speed, technical SEO and conversion optimisation. CRITICAL TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS • WordPress: The website must be built on WordPress, but absolutely NO heavy page builders (strictly no Elementor, Divi or bulky pre-made themes). • High Performance: Optimised for extremely fast loading times, minimal JavaScript, a clean DOM structure and excellent Google Core Web Vitals. • Preferred Stack: A clean Block/FSE (Full Site Editing) setup with lightweight custom blocks, a standard PHP custom theme, or Tailwind CSS integration. • Mobile-First & SEO Ready: Clean, semantic HTML markup with a mobile-first approach and architecture designed to support strong local SEO targeting. • Scalable WordPress Architecture: Custom Post Types/templates will be required for provider profiles, alongside a lightweight content/blog section and scalable page structures. WORKFLOW This project will be built collaboratively section-by-section and page-by-page. I already have website mock-ups, layouts and site-mapping diagrams prepared. We will agree on the website architecture and technical approach first, then build and test the site systematically. Attention to detail is extremely important. The finished website should closely match the agreed designs while remaining lightweight and highly optimised. WHO YOU ARE • You have a strong portfolio of custom, lightweight and high-performance WordPress websites. • You can provide examples of previous websites and, where possible, Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix results demonstrating their performance. • You are comfortable writing clean HTML/CSS/PHP and, where appropriate, Tailwind CSS. • You understand WordPress performance optimisation, database efficiency, Core Web Vitals and how to minimise unnecessary plugins, scripts and bloat. • You understand technical SEO, semantic HTML and mobile-first development. • You are comfortable working closely with someone who is highly particular about design accuracy, performance and attention to detail. WHEN APPLYING To demonstrate that you have read the entire brief, please begin your application with the phrase: “LIGHTWEIGHT WP” Applications that do not begin with this phrase will be ignored. Please also include: • 2–3 examples of your best-performing custom WordPress websites. • PageSpeed Insights/GTmetrix results where available. • A brief explanation of the WordPress stack/architecture you recommend for this project and why. • Your estimated fixed price per unique page/template. Please do not apply if your normal development process relies on Elementor, Divi or another heavy page builder.