WordPress Developer, SEO-Strong Builds for Digital Marketing Agency

We're a U.S. digital marketing agency building lead-generation websites for home-services businesses (plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical) and healthcare clients. For our clients, the website is the engine: it turns a Google search into a phone call, and a phone call into a booked job. This is not a page-builder role. You own the code: custom themes, custom plugins, PHP, and the technical SEO structure that makes a site rank. We're an agency ourselves, and we're hiring an individual freelancer to join our team, not another agency or a team reselling work. Solo operators only. What You'll Do - Build and modify custom WordPress themes and plugins from scratch, in code, not the admin panel - Take finished designs (from our Webflow designer or the client) and implement them pixel-tight, responsive, and fast - Own the technical SEO foundation: clean markup, heading structure, schema, canonicals, sitemaps, redirects, and indexability, built so our SEO team can rank it - Keep sites fast: Core Web Vitals, caching, image optimization, mobile performance - Write custom functionality in PHP and MySQL: hooks, actions, filters, custom post types, taxonomies, template hierarchy - Handle maintenance and QA: updates, troubleshooting, cross-browser testing, staging, launches Must-Have Skills - 5+ years of professional web development, with live sites you built that you can show - Custom WordPress at the code level: themes and plugins built from scratch, not assembled in Elementor, Divi, or WPBakery - Strong PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - Technical-SEO fluent: you know how heading structure, URLs, canonicals, schema, internal linking, and site speed affect rankings, and you build with that in mind - Self-directed: you take a design and a brief and ship, across multiple client builds at once - Able to overlap U.S. Central business hours Bonus Points - WooCommerce experience - Hands-on with Google Search Console and Google Analytics - Deeper structured-data work (Product, Breadcrumb, Organization, Review schema) Who This Is Not For - **Agencies or teams reselling work.** We're an agency, we want an individual freelancer. You personally do the work, no subcontracting, no account managers, no handing it to a team. We work directly with you, every day, over Slack. - Page-builder specialists. If your WordPress experience is mostly Elementor, Divi, or WPBakery, this will be miserable. - Developers who treat SEO as someone else's job. Here, your code is judged on rankings and phone calls, not just looks. - Designers looking for a design seat. This is build-from-designs, precision implementation. - Anyone under 5 years of experience, or who can't show real custom-code work, or can't overlap U.S. Central hours. Read This Before Applying (Non-Negotiables) - Mobile is the baseline, not an afterthought. Most of our clients' traffic is a homeowner on a phone. - QA is on you. Cross-browser, cross-device, before it ever reaches us. - This is an ongoing working relationship, not fire-and-forget builds. You'll juggle multiple clients with real deadlines. To Apply, Read Carefully (We Filter Hard) 1. **Start your proposal with this exact phrase: "Buzz Lightyear."** If it's missing, we skip you. It tells us you actually read this. 2. Link 2-3 live WordPress sites you built with custom themes or plugins. For each, one line on what you built at the code level (not "I set up the theme"). 3. Record a 60-90 second Loom: introduce yourself, walk through one of those sites, and explain the technical calls you made (theme structure, SEO decisions, performance work). This tests your English and how you think. 4. Confirm your hours overlap U.S. Central time. We care about sites that rank and phones that ring, not clever code for its own sake. If you're a strong fit, we move fast: a short call, then a paid trial.