Do you build custom WordPress themes or use ready-made ones?

Custom. A ready-made theme carries markup and features for thousands of other businesses, which is where the weight, the page-builder dependency and most of the speed problems come from. A custom theme ships only what your site needs, which is why it stays fast and stays maintainable.

Can you fix a slow WordPress website?

Usually, yes — and usually the cause is not what people expect. Hosting takes the blame, but the culprit is more often the theme, a page builder, or a stack of plugins loading on every page. I diagnose the actual bottleneck first, then fix the cause rather than adding another caching plugin on top.

Will moving my site to a new WordPress theme hurt my Google rankings?

Only if it is done carelessly. Rankings attach to specific URLs, so the risk comes from changing or dropping URLs without one-to-one 301 redirects. Done properly — URLs preserved, redirects mapped, titles, metadata and structured data carried across — a rebuild should hold or improve your position.

Can you make a WordPress site work properly in Arabic and English?

Yes, and it is one of the areas where most Kuwaiti sites are weakest. Proper bilingual WordPress means real right-to-left layout, an Arabic typeface chosen for screen reading, separate indexable URLs per language and correct hreflang — not a translate plugin over an English theme.

My WordPress site was hacked. Can you help?

Yes. That means cleaning the infection, finding how it got in — almost always an outdated plugin, a nulled theme or a weak admin password — and closing that hole, then putting updates, backups and hardening in place so it does not happen again.

Do you offer ongoing WordPress maintenance?

Yes, as a monthly arrangement: updates applied and tested, backups verified, security monitored and performance checked. Unmaintained WordPress is the single most common reason business sites get compromised.

How a WordPress project actually runs

Most WordPress projects that go wrong were lost before anyone opened a design tool. The scope was never written down, nobody agreed what happens to the old URLs, and the question of who edits the site after launch was left until the week of launch. So the work runs in five phases, and the first two get more attention than clients usually expect. The first two phases decide whether the last three go well. The migration phase is where existing rankings are won or lost. Every URL that changes needs a one-to-one redirect, titles and meta descriptions have to survive the move, and no page should quietly disappear because it was missed in the content audit. I have seen more Kuwaiti sites lose traffic to a careless relaunch than to any competitor, and the damage is usually invisible for weeks — which is exactly why it goes unnoticed until it is expensive to fix. Hand-over is treated as part of

What it costs to own, not just to build

The quote covers the build. It is the running cost that decides whether a site is still working two years later, and it is the part most proposals are quiet about. The visible cost is the one-off. The rest arrives every month. Hosting and a CDN are monthly. Premium plugin and theme licences renew annually, and a stack assembled without discipline turns into a renewal bill nobody can justify — which is one of the reasons I keep the plugin count deliberately low. Updates and security are the line most businesses skip, right up until a neglected plugin lets someone in. And content, particularly Arabic content written rather than translated, is underestimated on essentially every project I have been called into. I will give you an honest view of all of it before you commit, including the parts that argue against hiring me. If the running cost of a properly built WordPress site does not fit t

Why WordPress sites get slow

Almost always the same handful of causes, in roughly this order: a page builder generating far more markup than the page needs; a dozen plugins each loading their own CSS and JavaScript on every page whether it is used or not; images uploaded at full camera resolution; a bloated marketplace theme carrying features you will never switch on; and hosting chosen on price alone. None of that is fixed by installing another plugin, which is the usual first attempt. The fix is structural — fewer moving parts, server-rendered HTML, images sized properly, and caching configured with an understanding of what must not be cached. Speed is then measured against Core Web Vitals on a real phone on a mobile connection, not on a desktop in the office. The practical, step-by-step version of this is set out in my guide to optimising WordPress for Kuwaiti audiences.

When WordPress is the wrong answer

It is not always the right platform, and I will tell you when it is not. If the product is the application logic, a custom build is usually cleaner. If you need a simple marketing site and have no one to maintain anything, a hosted platform may serve you better — I have written an honest assessment of where Webflow fits and where it does not. If the real question is which technology decisions the business should be making at all, that is a Fractional CTO conversation rather than a build one. WordPress earns its place when you publish regularly, care about search, and want to own your content and your data. That covers most businesses — but not all of them.

Book: Website build

Tell me who you are. You pay on the next screen.

Website build — KD 690.000, paid today. A custom bilingual site in Arabic and English, no page builder and no bought template. The structure is agreed before we start, you see working pages every week, and you get documentation, training at handover and full ownership of the site, the hosting and the domain.

Management — KD 95 a year. Hosting, updates, uptime monitoring, from go-live, billed separately. Optional.