The UK WordPress agency for bespoke websites.
Synmek is a WordPress design agency and WordPress development agency in one — hand-coding custom themes, plugins, WooCommerce stores and headless builds for businesses across the UK and beyond. No templates, no page builders, no plugin bloat. Just clean code that ranks, converts, and scales.
Everything WordPress, under one roof.
We're a WordPress design agency and a WordPress development agency in equal measure — strategy, bespoke design, hand-coded build, and ongoing care, delivered by one team that owns the whole stack.
WordPress Design
Bespoke, conversion-focused designs tailored to your brand and built on user research — never an off-the-shelf theme.
WordPress Development
Custom-coded themes, plugin development, API integrations, and headless WordPress with React or Next.js frontends.
WordPress SEO
Technical SEO, Core Web Vitals, schema markup, and content architecture built into every project from day one.
Custom WordPress, not a stack of plugins.
Most "WordPress agencies" install a premium theme, bolt on 40 plugins, and call it bespoke. We don't. Every Synmek build is a custom theme written in clean PHP with Advanced Custom Fields, a modern Webpack pipeline, and a performance budget. The result is a WordPress site that scores 95+ on Lighthouse, loads in under two seconds, and stays maintainable for years.
- Custom theme development with modern build pipelines
- Bespoke plugin development for unique business logic
- WooCommerce stores with subscriptions and memberships
- WordPress Multisite for enterprise and franchise networks
- Migration from Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, or legacy CMS
WordPress that ranks as fast as it loads.
Speed and search visibility aren't add-ons we sell later — they're how we build. Semantic HTML, optimised assets, structured data, and a content architecture designed to win clusters of related keywords rather than a single term. It's the same approach we use on our own site.
- Core Web Vitals tuned to pass on mobile and desktop
- Schema markup and rich-result optimisation as standard
- Clean URL structure and internal-linking architecture
- Image, font, and script optimisation out of the box
Find the right starting point.
WordPress Design in London
Bespoke, brand-led WordPress design — no templates, no page-builder bloat. See the portfolio.
Hire a WordPress Developer
Need custom themes, plugins, or a build partner? Meet our London WordPress developers.
Headless WordPress
WordPress as a backend with a React or Next.js frontend for maximum performance.
WooCommerce & E-Commerce
Custom WooCommerce stores, subscriptions, and checkout optimisation.
WordPress Maintenance
Security, updates, backups, and performance monitoring from £150/month.
WordPress SEO
Technical SEO and content strategy to grow your organic traffic.
A UK agency, run from London.
We work with clients across the United Kingdom and have done for fourteen years. The studio itself sits in London, which matters less than agencies usually pretend: a WordPress build is specified, designed, written and shipped the same way whether you are in Manchester, Bristol, Leeds or two Tube stops away. What actually needs proximity is a photo shoot or an in-person workshop, and we will say so if your project depends on one.
If you are searching locally, these are the pages you probably want:
- WordPress designer London — bespoke design, theme design and the portfolio
- WordPress developer London — build, integrations, rates and engagement models
- WooCommerce development London — stores, subscriptions and checkout work
- WordPress design in Ealing — our own corner of west London
- Toronto and Los Angeles — where we work outside the UK
Everything on this page applies wherever you are. The city pages exist because the local questions genuinely differ — currency, timezone, accessibility law — not because the work does.
Six phases from brief to launch.
Discovery
Business goals, audience research, competitive analysis.
Strategy
Sitemap, content architecture, keyword mapping.
Design
Wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, responsive layouts.
Build
Custom theme, ACF, performance budget, QA.
Launch
Migration, redirects, analytics, SEO sign-off.
Grow
Maintenance, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
What a bespoke WordPress site costs.
Every project is quoted after a discovery session, but here's where our WordPress builds typically land so you can plan a budget before you talk to us.
Brochure & Marketing Sites
From £5,000. A focused, custom-designed WordPress site with a hand-coded theme, CMS, and SEO foundations.
Business & Content Sites
£8,000–£25,000. Larger builds with bespoke design systems, custom post types, integrations, and content architecture.
WooCommerce & Web Apps
From £15,000. Custom stores, subscriptions, memberships, and headless builds scoped to your requirements.
Care & Support
From £150/month. Updates, security, backups, performance monitoring, and priority support after launch.
Real WordPress engineers, not outsourced installs.
Every Synmek site is designed and hand-coded in-house by a senior team — no offshore handoffs, no page-builder shortcuts. We build on our own open-source foundation, the Thorn starter theme, and follow WordPress coding standards on every project so your site stays fast, secure, and maintainable for years.
- In-house designers and WordPress developers on every project
- Built on the open-source Thorn starter theme we maintain
- WordPress coding standards, version control, and documented handovers
- Recognised by DesignRush, Yahoo Finance, and BusinessMole for our work
Four people who build, not forty who manage.
The word agency covers two very different businesses. One is a layer of account managers, strategists and producers who coordinate work done elsewhere. The other is a small group of people who do the work themselves. We are firmly the second, and it changes the experience in ways worth knowing before you brief anyone.
You talk to the person writing the code. There is no account manager translating your requirement into a ticket and translating the answer back, which removes the most common source of both delay and misunderstanding. It also means we cannot absorb ten simultaneous projects — we take on what we can genuinely staff, and occasionally that means telling you we are three weeks out.
The trade is real in both directions. A larger agency gives you redundancy, a dedicated point of contact and the capacity to run several workstreams at once. If your project needs that structure, it is worth paying for. What we offer instead is that the people who scoped your project are the people who deliver it, and the standards do not degrade between the pitch and the build.
Published, because hiding it wastes both our time.
Every figure below is a starting point, not a quote. What moves the number is almost always integrations and content volume, not page count.
Brochure & marketing sites — from £5,000
Custom-designed, hand-coded, with a content model your team can actually use. Most professional-services sites land between £5,000 and £12,000.
WooCommerce — from £15,000
Commerce brings tax, shipping, inventory, payment and fulfilment logic. That complexity is where the budget goes, not the storefront design.
Applications — £25,000+
Portals, configurators, membership systems and anything where your business logic lives in the site rather than beside it.
Retainers & day rate
Ongoing work from £150/month. Team augmentation and time-and-materials at £900 per day, quoted after a scoping call.
Six phases, and you see work in all of them.
No long silence between kickoff and a reveal. There is a staging URL from the first week and you watch it fill up.
Discovery
Requirements, content model, integrations, and the constraints nobody put in the brief. Ends with fixed scope and fixed price.
Architecture
Content types, taxonomies, fields and hosting decided before code. This is the phase that determines whether year three is cheap or expensive.
Design
Art direction agreed first, then the page designs that matter. Signed off before anything is built.
Build
Hand-coded on our Thorn foundation, in version control, on a staging URL you can see from day one.
QA & launch
Cross-browser, device and accessibility testing, Lighthouse work, redirect mapping and Search Console verification.
Handover
Documentation, a walkthrough recording and repository access. You own the code outright.
Who we work best with.
We would rather lose a project at the enquiry stage than three months in. Here is a straight read on where we do our best work and where somebody else will serve you better.
You are probably a good fit if:
- You want the people who scoped the project to be the people who build it, and you are comfortable with a small team rather than a large account structure.
- Your site has a commercial job to do — enquiries, bookings, sales — and you can say what it is.
- You value a maintainable codebase over the cheapest possible build, because you expect the site to be around in five years.
- You have someone who can make decisions. Projects stall on approval chains far more often than on development.
We are probably the wrong choice if:
- You need several parallel workstreams and a dedicated account manager. That is a larger agency's job and worth paying for.
- Your budget is below about £5,000. We cannot do custom design and development well at that level, and would rather point you at a good template implementation.
- You want the lowest price available. There is always somebody cheaper, and for genuinely simple sites they may be the right call.
- You need someone physically in the room regularly. We are a London studio and work remotely with most clients.
None of that is posturing. An agency that says yes to everything ends up doing everything adequately, and we would rather be genuinely useful to fewer people.