Senior WordPress Developer

What This Role Actually Is

We’re a B2B marketing agency. Our clients’ websites aren’t portfolio pieces — they’re live sales tools that generate pipeline. When something breaks, it costs them deals. When a page loads slowly, it costs them SEO rankings. When a Figma design doesn’t translate correctly on mobile, it costs them credibility.

We need one person who owns all of that. Not someone who builds sites and hands them off. Someone who builds them right, deploys them cleanly, and stays accountable for what happens after go-live.

If your definition of ‘done’ is pushing to production, this isn’t the right role.

About Pangolin Marketing

We’re a fully remote B2B marketing agency working with SaaS, climate tech, and enterprise software clients. We run websites, campaigns, content, and brand work for companies that want to own their category. Our web work spans new builds, redesigns, landing pages, and ongoing maintenance across multiple client accounts.

You’ll Fail Here If:

Your involvement ends at launch — you’ve never owned a site post-go-live

You’ve never diagnosed a ‘site is down’ incident without someone walking you through it

You build pixel-perfect pages but have never looked at a GTmetrix or Core Web Vitals report and known what to do with it

You use page builders as a substitute for understanding what’s happening in the code

You’ve never touched server configuration, DNS records, or a hosting control panel

You treat performance optimisation as something you do only when a client complains

You need a detailed brief to start — our Figma files are thorough but real-world websites always have gaps

You’ve never set up or managed a staging-to-production deployment workflow

‘It works on my machine’ has ever been your answer to a cross-browser issue

What You’ll Own

Development (60%):

Build pixel-perfect, responsive websites from Figma designs — no approximations, no ‘close enough’

Develop custom WordPress themes and templates from scratch — not just Elementor configurations

Build and maintain landing pages, microsites, and campaign pages at speed — one page per day is the baseline, not the ceiling

Integrate third-party APIs: CRMs, marketing automation tools, analytics platforms, form handlers

Work in Webflow when clients require it — you don’t need to be an expert but you can’t be a beginner

Write clean, commented code that another developer can pick up without a 45-minute handover call

Web Ops & Maintenance (40%):

Own L1 and L2 incident response: site down, pages not loading, SSL errors, plugin conflicts, DB connection failures, frontend breaking due to plugin conflicts, SEO hack attacks, PHP mismatch, builder conflicts — you have a diagnostic process and you run it

Manage server-side configuration: hosting environments, caching layers (Redis, Varnish, WP Super Cache), CDN setup, PHP and MySQL tuning

Own website performance: Core Web Vitals, GTmetrix/PageSpeedInsight scores, image optimisation (WebP, lazy loading, compression), and caching strategy

Manage WordPress multisite setups where required for multi-lingual or multi-geography sites

Run and verify staging-to-production deployments — you don’t push untested code to live

Keep plugins, themes, and core updated without breaking things — you test before you update

Own DNS management and domain configurations when clients need changes

Set up and maintain uptime monitoring — you know when a site goes down before the client does

Technical Requirements

Must-Have

WordPress: custom theme dev from Figma, hooks/filters, child themes

Page builders: Elementor and/or Divi — know when to use them and when not to

PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript — not a full-stack dev but comfortable in all four

Basic React/JS — enough to build interactive components and integrate headless setups

Server management: cPanel/Plesk/WHM, SSH, FTP, DNS configuration, shared and VPS servers, 1Panel, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Hostinger

Performance optimisation: Core Web Vitals, image formats, caching, CDN

Multisite WordPress setup and management

API integrations: REST APIs, webhooks, third-party plugin development

Git-based version control and staging/production workflows

SSL certificate installation and renewal

Strong Advantage

Webflow — build and manage sites, not just edit content

WooCommerce — setup, configuration, and troubleshooting

Headless WordPress with React front-end

Basic SEO technical implementation: schema markup, sitemap setup, robots.txt, redirect management

Google Search Console and GTmetrix — can read a report and act on it

Experience with hosting platforms: Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways, SiteGround

What You Get

Variety: no two client sites are the same — SaaS, climate tech, enterprise software, all with different stacks and different problems

Ownership: you’re not a ticket-taker. You make the technical calls.

Remote, async-first: your output matters more than when you’re online

Speed over bureaucracy: decisions get made fast, you won’t wait two weeks for approval to fix something

Work that actually ships: no 6-month projects that die in review

How to Apply

Send your resume, a link to 2–3 live WordPress sites you built (not just designed — built and deployed), and a one-paragraph answer to this question: ‘Describe the last time a website you were responsible for went down. What happened, how did you diagnose it, and how long did it take to fix?’ to [email protected]

No portfolio of mockups. Live URLs only. If a site you built no longer exists, describe it and explain why.