WordPress Developer: Custom Theme Speed, SEO Foundations & Conversion Tracking

looking for an experienced WordPress developer to deliver a defined technical improvement project on a client website in the healthcare sector. Important: this is not a page builder site. It runs a custom, hand-coded WordPress theme built on Bootstrap 5. You will be working directly in theme PHP, template files and custom post types. If your experience is mainly Elementor, Divi or WPBakery, this is not the right fit and we would rather you skip it than take it on. The site looks good and the client is happy with the design. We are explicitly not redesigning it. The work is entirely about how the site is built, how fast it loads, how it is structured for search, and whether we can measure what it produces. The problems we are solving The homepage takes around 13 seconds to load its main content on mobile An old duplicate homepage is still live and indexed Page titles and meta descriptions are wrong or duplicated across key pages Blog articles are published at root level rather than in a blog section Key service categories are bundled onto single pages rather than having individual pages Booking hands off to a third-party platform on another domain, which breaks conversion tracking entirely Structured data and internal linking are thin or absent Scope of work 1. Speed rebuild Take mobile LCP from around 13s to under 3s. Image compression and WebP conversion, correct srcset, self-hosted fonts with proper caching, deferred and async JS, critical CSS, lazy loading below the fold, cache plugin configuration. There is a hero video on the homepage that must stay exactly as it is visually, but must be moved out of the critical rendering path. 2. Site restructure Redirect a duplicate homepage, move blog content into a proper blog section, restructure service and category hierarchies. Full redirect mapping with 301s, no chains, no lost URLs. Sitemap regeneration and resubmission. 3. SEO foundations Unique titles and meta descriptions across every URL, correction of wrongly assigned metadata, heading structure fixes, local search targeting, schema implementation (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, Person, Review), internal linking structure built into templates. 4. New templates A category/condition page template and a campaign landing page template, both matching existing brand styling, both field-driven so non-developers can add pages afterwards without dev time. Roughly 15-20 pages built from these templates. 5. Conversion tracking GA4 event tracking across all forms and contact methods, Google Ads and Meta conversion tracking, first-party storage of UTMs and click IDs passed through to the third-party booking platform so attribution survives the handoff, plus a proper post-submission thank-you page. Full documentation of every tag, trigger and variable. 6. Additional builds Pricing page rebuild with a single-source price system, a finance page with a BNPL provider integration, before/after gallery blocks, a live reviews block pulling from the Google Places API, and site-wide WhatsApp contact buttons with click tracking. 7. Accessibility and crawl basics Descriptive link names, alt text, WCAG 2.1 AA contrast checks, keyboard navigation and focus states, form label associations, canonical and robots sanity check. How we work All work on staging. Nothing goes live without our sign-off Full backup before you start Child theme or version control from day one, no editing live theme files through the dashboard Baseline metrics captured before any change is made Short written update at the end of each working day We supply a full written brief with acceptance criteria for every task, so there is no ambiguity about what "done" means Requirements Demonstrable Core Web Vitals work on custom-coded themes, not page builder sites Strong PHP and WordPress template hierarchy knowledge, comfortable with custom post types and custom fields Technical SEO understanding, including schema and redirect management GA4 and GTM implementation experience, including cross-domain and third-party platform tracking Confident written English and reliable daily communication Available to start within the next week Nice to have Experience with regulated or healthcare sector sites Google Places API integration experience BNPL or payment provider integration experience