Web Developer — LearnPress + Elementor (custom dev + ongoing support for a membership site)

We run a growing UK membership and training organisation (a standards body for damp & mould professionals) built on WordPress. We're looking for a reliable, communicative, long-term developer to look after the site day to day and help us ship a series of significant upgrades — including custom features that need real development, not just plugin configuration. To be blunt about what we're looking for: our current setup gets things done at a bare minimum, with little thought for design or UX, and communication is slow. We want the opposite — someone responsive, easy to work with, who genuinely writes code, and who takes pride in how things look and work. There are two sides to the work: Ongoing support & quick fixes — bugs, breakages, small changes, and maintenance turned around promptly (not in a week). Major upgrades & custom features — larger builds involving custom code, scoped as proper projects with attention to UX and design. Our stack WordPress + Elementor LearnPress (courses / LMS) MemberPress (membership, access control, member area) Custom PHP snippets (WPCode), custom HTML/CSS/JS, and the WordPress REST API What matters most to us Real coding ability — you write custom PHP and JavaScript, build features and integrations from scratch, and work with the REST API. This role is not drag-and-drop page-building or stringing plugins together; those are just part of the toolkit. Communication — clear written English, quick to reply, proactive about what's happening and when it'll be done. Speed — fast on support; realistic, kept-to timelines on bigger work. Design & UX sense — you care how a page looks and how a user moves through it, and you flag when something could be better. Ownership — you catch problems, suggest improvements, and don't need chasing. Working with AI (please read) We use Claude (AI) to help produce code, designs and content. You'll often be handed working, paste-ready HTML / PHP / WordPress snippets and assets to review, integrate, test and improve on the live site. We want a developer who's comfortable collaborating with AI-assisted output, sanity-checking it, and making it production-ready — it should make your job faster, not harder. Required experience Proven custom WordPress development — hand-coded functionality, custom plugins/snippets, hooks/filters, and third-party integrations (not just theme and plugin setup) Strong PHP and JavaScript; comfortable with the WordPress REST API Hands-on experience with membership sites — MemberPress strongly preferred LearnPress or comparable LMS experience Strong Elementor skills, including custom CSS Good eye for design/UX Nice to have Member dashboards, gated content, role-based access Performance/optimisation and technical SEO Staging-site workflow (you don't experiment on live)