WordPress, without the plugin soup.

WordPress is the most capable platform on this list: fully open, serves anything, no ceiling. It is also the easiest to ruin. Plugin stacks fight each other, themes print three copies of half-wrong schema, and installs age until someone is afraid to touch them. I work on WordPress in both directions: making a good install findable, and migrating people off a bad one without losing what it earned.

How I work on WordPress

• Layer onto your WordPress site. Hand-authored structured data, crawler policy, llms.txt at root (WordPress serves it natively, no workaround needed), and performance work.
• Untangle. When plugins and themes each emit their own half of the machine layer, I reduce it to one clean, validated layer.
• Migrate off, rankings intact. I moved findfulfillingwork.org off an aging WordPress install with all 46 articles preserved at their original URLs, and the search equity carried over whole. Read that case.

The machine layer on WordPress

• No platform ceiling. Schema, llms.txt, robots.txt, redirects, and server-level performance are all fully controllable. On WordPress the constraint is discipline, not capability.
• Schema by hand, not by plugin default. SEO plugins emit generic markup; hand-authored JSON-LD describes your actual business, validated on the live pages.
• Migrations preserve URLs. Whether moving into, inside, or off WordPress, every existing URL keeps working. Rankings follow URLs, and that rule is absolute.

Platform capabilities move. Before any engagement starts, I re-verify every constraint on this page against the platform’s current documentation and your actual plan tier. You get what is true at kickoff, not what was true when this page was written.