Strategy, architecture, and code-review consulting for WordPress projects. Independent advice without the agency upsell.
Base scope of work — applies to all tiers. See the tier comparison below for hours and SLA specifics.
Recorded if you want them. We pre-read everything you send and arrive with questions, not a generic intake script.
Deep-Dive and Embedded tiers include written deliverables. Includes options, tradeoffs, our specific recommendation, and what would change our mind.
Pull-request reviews, theme audits, plugin selection. We tell you what to refactor and what to live with.
Got a $50k quote from an agency? We read it, scrub the line items, tell you what to negotiate and what to walk from.
Job descriptions, technical screening questions, take-home tasks. We can sit in on final-round interviews if useful.
WordPress headless vs traditional, ACF vs Pods, page builder vs custom block, hosting choices. We document the decision so future you remembers why.
Site got hacked, agency went dark, key dev quit. We help you map next 7 days — what to fix today, what to delegate, what to delay.
Quarterly check-ins on your tech roadmap. What's still relevant, what to deprioritize, what's missing.
Transparent process — you always know what stage we're at and what comes next.
Free 30-minute call to scope. We figure out what you actually need — hour, package, advisor — and whether we're the right fit. Sometimes we say no and refer.
You send us docs, codebase access (read-only), agency quotes, whatever's relevant. We pre-read so call time is spent on questions, not catchup.
Real conversation. We push back on assumptions, surface options you hadn't considered, share what we've seen on similar projects. Recorded if you want.
15–25 page document with our recommendation. Not a generic template — this is the thing you can hand to a stakeholder or future you to remember the decision.
30 days of async Slack/email access for clarifying questions on the deliverable. After that, hourly rate applies.
Pick the level that fits your size and required response time. You can switch tiers between months.
Best for quick decisions or one-off code reviews. Pay per hour, no minimum.
10-hour package over 2–4 weeks. Strategy session + written report + follow-up call.
For founders and CTOs running their own team but wanting senior WordPress eyes on the work. 3-month minimum.
Scope transparency — no surprises in the monthly report.
Access we require — passed via secure channel (1Password / Bitwarden).
"Saved us $35k. Topcms read the agency proposal we were about to sign and pointed out three line items that were duplicate work. We renegotiated to $48k."
"We were about to migrate off WooCommerce to Shopify. Two-hour call with Topcms convinced us to stay and fix three specific things instead. Three months later, conversions up 28%."
Outdoor-gear retailer Northdrift had 1,840 SKUs on Shopify Plus paying $2k/mo. We migrated to WooCommerce + Bricks Builder over 5 weeks. Platform costs dropped 95%, organic traffic held within 4% week-over-week, and the editorial team got actual product-page flexibility.
A climate SaaS had a Next.js marketing site no one on marketing could edit without a JIRA ticket. We added headless WordPress with Gutenberg as the editor and on-demand revalidation. Publish time: 4 days to 90 seconds.
Carpathian Daily ran three separate WordPress installs and a Google Docs copy-paste workflow for trilingual publishing. We replaced it with one Polylang Pro site and a custom editorial bridge. Publish time per article: 40 minutes to 3. Organic traffic doubled in four months.
Consulting fits when you already have a team (in-house or agency) doing the work, and need senior eyes on decisions. Development fits when you need someone to execute. If you’re not sure, book a 30-minute intake call — we’ll tell you honestly which one you need.
Hourly is cheaper for one-off questions (1–5 hours total). Package is cheaper if you need a written deliverable or expect 8+ hours of work, because the package includes async investigation time we don’t charge separately.
An audit is a structured report on the current state of a site (technical, SEO, security). Consulting is a strategic conversation about what to do next — could be acting on an audit, could be hiring decisions, could be roadmap. Audit gives you data; consulting gives you a decision.
Yes. Standard mutual NDA before any pre-work. We’ve signed enough of these that we have a template that’s usually accepted, or we can sign yours after a 24-hour legal review.
Yes. Read-only repo access, we do a written review with severity-tagged findings (critical, major, minor). Most agency code reviews surface 10–20 issues. We don’t bill the agency — only you.
Yes. We turn down clients in over-saturated niches or where we’re not the right specialty (e.g. enterprise WooCommerce at $50M GMV). When we do, we name 2–3 agencies we’d send our friends to.
The Embedded Advisor tier is close to fractional CTO for the WordPress slice of your stack. We don’t take fractional CTO roles outside WordPress — the calls usually go off our domain expertise within a few weeks.
Sometimes you don’t need a development team — you need a second
opinion. Should you migrate off WooCommerce to Shopify or stay? Is your
agency’s $80k rebuild quote reasonable? Which Page Builder is least
likely to wreck your site in three years? We do strategy and review
work without taking over your project: hour-by-hour, or fixed-package
deep-dives. Most engagements last 2 weeks to 3 months and end with you
still owning the build.
Adjacent engagements: written audit
when you need a deliverable to share with stakeholders,
full development if the
consulting reveals you need execution help, and
migration when the strategy
session lands on “move off the current stack”.
If after the first call you decide we’re not the right fit, we don’t bill for it. Pre-work + first hour is free until you sign off on the scope.
