When we recommend WordPress
When you will publish often and manage it yourself: news, articles, events and products. When your team already works with WordPress and does not want to learn a new dashboard. When the store is standard and WooCommerce is enough for it, as with Pelikan DTM. When you already have a WordPress website that you want to keep rather than replace.
We do not recommend it when the website needs to connect to a warehouse, booking system, payment system or custom software, or when every tenth of a second matters. In those cases, we build a Next.js website and say so in our first reply, because WordPress with ten plugins for all of that becomes slow and difficult to maintain.
How we build the theme
The theme is written for you, not bought. We keep it under version control and deploy it with a script that refuses to overwrite a change made directly on the server. There is no visual editor injecting unnecessary code into every page, and only the plugins the site cannot do without. That is how Pelikan DTM’s store was built: a custom WooCommerce theme, 860 products in a category tree up to four levels deep, filters by brand and type, colour selection that changes the image and product number, a price enquiry for every product, a mega menu on desktop and a three-level menu on mobile.
Under the hood, the site is protected from the bots that bring filter-heavy stores down, while scheduled WordPress tasks run from the server on a timetable rather than being triggered by visits, after those visits brought the server down once. These are things you do not see on screen, but they determine whether the site will still work a year from now.
What you get
WordPress installed on your hosting or on our server, with a custom theme, your pages and content migrated from the old site, if you have one. Google titles and descriptions for every page, a sitemap, structured data and Search Console. Google Analytics 4 configured to track forms and calls. Administrator access in your name, training on how to publish, and all access credentials handed over to you.
Not included: writing copy from scratch, professional photography, paid plugins or licences if the site needs them-we list these as separate line items-domain fees and advertising. Post-launch support is optional: €100-€350 per month, depending on what we maintain.
You already have a WordPress site
There are three options, and we recommend them based on our review-not on which one costs more. The first is to make the site faster and more secure without a new design: updates, lighter images, fewer plugins and better hosting. The second is a new theme with the same content, when the structure works but the look is outdated. The third is taking over the site on a monthly maintenance plan when the person who built it is no longer responding. If the site needs to connect to a system, we do that through WordPress’s data interface without replacing the site.
WordPress maintenance
WordPress and its plugins release updates every month, and an outdated site is the most common route to a breach. As part of maintenance, we update them after taking a restorable backup, keep a copy of the site every night on a separate server, monitor whether it responds, and make small content changes. The price is €100-€350 per month, depending on the volume, and is listed in the proposal together with what it includes.
WordPress hosting
WordPress runs on most shared hosting services in Bulgaria, and if you are already paying for one and are happy with it, we deploy the site there; the domain remains in your name in every case. A store with a large catalogue or a site with many visitors is better on a dedicated server: Pelikan DTM’s store is on our server with Cloudflare in front, because bots crawling the filtered pages brought it down once and are now stopped before they reach it. We tell you which option is right for you before the proposal, not afterwards, and we do not make you pay for two hosting services.
