CMS development: a website your team can update without breaking it

A content management system is the admin area behind your website, where your team writes pages, posts news, changes prices and swaps photos. A good one feels like editing a document. A bad one turns every change into a risk: one wrong drag and the homepage layout collapses, so people stop touching it, and eighteen months later the “latest news” is from 2024.

CMS development is the work of shaping that admin area around your content and the people who edit it. For most UK businesses and charities we do it on WordPress, with a theme and editing blocks we build ourselves, so editors get exactly the options they need and nothing that can break the design.

Signs your CMS is the problem

• The marketing team emails changes to a developer because they are scared of the editor.
• The site was built with Elementor, Divi or WPBakery and is now slow, with a plug-in update that breaks something every few months.
• You have several editors and no sense of who changed what, or any way to have a page approved before it goes live.
• You publish lots of structured content, such as events, vacancies, case studies, branches or resources, and it is all crammed into ordinary pages.
• You are on Wix or Squarespace and have hit a wall with SEO, integrations or multi-user editing.

Why we don’t use page builders

This is the one opinion we hold most firmly. Page builders promise drag-and-drop freedom. What they deliver is heavy code on every page, a dependency on someone else’s licence, and enough freedom for an editor to wreck the spacing, fonts and colour contrast before lunch. Accessibility is usually the first thing to go, because nobody checks contrast when dragging a button onto a photo.

We build classic WordPress themes by hand with custom Gutenberg blocks for every content pattern you actually use: hero, service card, price table, team member, call to action, FAQ. Editors fill in fields and choose from sensible options. The design stays consistent, pages stay light, and the site can still score well on Lighthouse and meet WCAG 2.2 AA a year after launch, not just on the day we hand over.

You lose the ability to put a purple button at an angle. Most teams don’t miss it.

What a WE-DEV CMS build includes

• A hand-built WordPress theme with custom blocks matched to your content.
• Custom post types for things that aren’t pages: services, projects, events, team, locations, products, vacancies.
• Roles and workflow: authors draft, editors approve, admins manage settings.
• Reusable sections, such as contact strips and calls to action, edited once and updated everywhere.
• SEO fields, schema, redirects and XML sitemaps built in, so you are not juggling five plug-ins for the basics.
• Migration from your current CMS, with content, images, metadata and 301 redirects for every old URL.
• An editor training session and a written guide that lives in the admin area.

Classic, headless or custom?

We built a custom CMS and e-commerce donation platform for UNICEF because the content and the giving journey had to work as one system. For most organisations, though, classic WordPress done properly is cheaper to build, cheaper to run and far easier to find help for. If someone is selling you headless for a ten-page brochure site, ask them what problem it solves. Our plain-English guide to headless vs classic WordPress goes further.

Moving from Wix, Squarespace or another CMS

Migrations are a big share of our CMS work. The content move is the easy bit. The care goes into URLs: every old page needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent, or the rankings it has built up leak away. We crawl the old site, build a redirect map, check it on staging, and watch Search Console after launch. Our guide to migrating from Wix or Squarespace to WordPress covers the process in detail.

How a project runs

We start with a content audit: what you have, what gets updated, who updates it and what annoys them. From that we design the content model, meaning the post types, fields and blocks, before we design a single page. You review the editing experience on a staging site, not just the front end, because the admin area is where your team will spend its time. Then we migrate, redirect, train and launch.

What it costs

For work on an existing WordPress site you book WordPress development hours at £50 an hour excluding VAT, and the hours never expire. Ten hours is £500 less 5 %, so £475; 30 hours is £1,500 less 15 %, so £1,275, or £1,530 including VAT. A 15 to 30 page site with a handful of unique layouts usually sits towards the lower end of the rebuild range. Lots of bespoke templates push it up. New sites can start from one of our fixed-price packages.

Working with us

The team is based in London and builds CMS sites for organisations all over the UK. Training works well over a video call with screen-share, and we record it so new staff can watch it later. If you are in London or the South East and would rather train in person, we are happy to come to you.

Get a CMS your team will actually use

Tell us what system you have now, who edits the site and what frustrates them. We will recommend the simplest set-up that fixes it. Contact us or call 020 3918 3814.