WordPress plugins

Custom plugins for jobs no off-the-shelf plugin will do well.

Bespoke WordPress plugins for unique business logic, third-party integrations, custom admin tooling, and front-end functionality your theme should not own. Modern PHP, proper testing, performance budgets, and a plugin you can hand to an internal team in two years without a translator.

Stack

PHP 8.2+, modern WP APIs

Quality

PHPUnit, PHPCS, type hints

Front-end

React/Vue admin UIs where useful

Hand-over

Documented, tested, owned

What is WordPress plugin development?

WordPress plugin development is the practice of building bespoke plugins for specific business workflows — integrations, custom post types, admin tools, public-facing widgets — that do not belong in the theme. Custom plugins are auditable, portable, and tuned to one job rather than every possible use case.

Why bespoke plugins

When 'is there a plugin for that?' is no longer the right question.

Most plugin needs are met by something on WordPress.org or in a paid marketplace. The bespoke plugin builds we take on are the ones where the off-the-shelf options bend the workflow to fit the plugin instead of the plugin to fit the workflow. Custom logic, deep integrations with internal systems, performance-critical paths that cannot afford a generic plugin's overhead, or admin tooling that needs to feel like part of WordPress instead of an iframe of someone else's product.

What we hear most

Common reasons brands commission a custom plugin.

01

Off-the-shelf plugin imposes a workflow

The plugin works fine but it makes the editorial team adapt to its assumptions. The custom plugin inverts that — built around how your team thinks, not how someone else's marketplace product was scoped.

02

Integration with an internal system

ERP, CRM, PIM, or a bespoke API needs to talk to WordPress (or vice versa). The integration has to be reliable, retryable, and observable — not a Zapier glue line that fails silently.

03

Performance-critical functionality

A search, filter, or recommendation that runs on every page load and needs to be fast. A generic plugin queries unindexed tables; the custom plugin uses the right schema, the right cache, and the right precomputation.

04

Admin tooling for a specific role

Editors need a custom dashboard, sales need a quoting tool, support needs a customer-history view. Each one is faster as a custom WordPress plugin than as a separate app the team has to context-switch into.

05

Compliance or audit requirements

GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, or industry-specific rules require logs and controls that off-the-shelf plugins do not provide. The custom plugin is the cheaper compliance path.

06

Plugin you've outgrown

An existing plugin started simple and is now a grab-bag of features. Performance has degraded. Updates are slow. Forking and rebuilding under a custom plugin is the cleaner long-term move.

What we deliver

What ships in a Haxtiv plugin engagement.

A bespoke plugin built for the job, tested under load, and documented so your team can take ownership.

Engineering

  • Modern PHP (8.2+) with type declarations and PSR autoloading
  • Composer-based dependency management
  • Custom database schema designed around the workload
  • REST or GraphQL endpoints for headless front-ends
  • WP-CLI commands for ops and migrations

Admin UI

  • React-powered admin pages where the workflow demands it
  • Custom Gutenberg blocks for editor-facing functionality
  • Settings pages that look like part of WordPress, not a foreign embed
  • Role-aware capabilities and menu placement
  • Bulk actions and queryable list tables

Integrations

  • REST/GraphQL clients for third-party APIs with retry and circuit-breaker
  • Webhook receivers with signature verification
  • OAuth flows where authentication is required
  • Background queues for long-running jobs (Action Scheduler)
  • Observability hooks: structured logs and metrics

Quality

  • PHPUnit test suite with realistic fixtures
  • PHPCS with WordPress coding standards
  • Static analysis (PHPStan or Psalm)
  • Manual QA pass on staging with the editorial team
  • Load tests for performance-critical paths

Hand-over

  • Plugin code in your repository under your license
  • README and CONTRIBUTING for new developers
  • Loom-led walkthroughs for the editorial team
  • Operational runbook for on-call
  • 30 days of post-launch support included

Process

How this service runs end to end

The same six-step shape we use across every Haxtiv project — adapted to the specifics of this scope.

  1. 01

    Discover

    Audit, intent, and the part nobody is saying out loud

    We open with a working session — not a deck. We pull analytics, crawl the existing site, audit the brand, and interview the people closest to revenue. We surface the friction inside the team, not just the friction on the screen.

  2. 02

    Define

    Sitemap, story, and the metrics that actually matter

    We define the audience journeys, the commercial pages we are willing to defend, the SEO architecture, and the measurable outcomes. You get a shape of the project that survives feedback because it was built on evidence.

  3. 03

    Design

    Editorial system, art-directed, never templated

    Type, grid, motion, and tone built as a system. We design the hero, the long pages, the unloved corners, and the empty states. Every screen looks like it belongs to the same studio. Nothing is parked for later.

  4. 04

    Build

    Production code your team can keep

    WordPress, Shopify, or page builder — we build clean, accessible, performant, and documented. Component-led, naming you'll recognize next year, and a changelog your in-house team can read.

  5. 05

    Launch

    Migration without losing rankings or sleep

    Pre-launch crawl, redirect map, schema and metadata cutover, performance baseline, and a launch playbook. We run the deploy with you, not at you.

  6. 06

    Grow

    Care plan, CRO sprints, and quiet improvements

    We stay involved. Monthly performance reports, security and core updates, and CRO sprints that compound. The site gets better the longer you keep us.

What this looks like in production

Numbers we earn, not numbers we round up.

0+

Sites shipped

across 27 countries

0k

Studio hours

delivered since 2019

0.0x

Avg conversion lift

post-redesign clients

0%

Client retention

into year two

In their words

Senior teams who chose us.

Haxtiv replatformed our marketing site without losing a single ranking. We saw organic leads up 38% inside the first quarter and the editorial team finally has a layout system they don't fight.

Mara Iglesias

VP Marketing · Lumenwave Health

Headless WordPress redesign

Our previous Shopify build was a Frankenstein of apps. The Haxtiv team simplified the stack, rebuilt the PDP and CRO patterns, and our store is faster and more profitable than it has ever been.

Daniel Korver

Founder · Northbound Goods

Shopify Plus rebuild

Frequently asked

Answers worth asking for.

Don't see the question you're holding? Send it to [email protected] and we'll answer the same day.

Yes — we build to current WordPress and PHP versions, follow the deprecation paths announced on make.wordpress.org, and write tests that catch regressions. Most of our plugins have run unchanged across 6+ WordPress major releases.

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Where to go next

Start here

Got a WordPress problem no plugin solves cleanly? Brief us.

30-minute call. We'll sketch the right shape, share a fair quote, and tell you what's better solved another way.

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