Custom Theme Design
Custom block themes drafted in Figma, coded in PHP and theme.json, and shipped without ThemeForest baggage. Your designers get freedom; your editors get guardrails; nobody gets locked into someone else's framework.
The Turn Group is a Kansas City WordPress development agency offering full-stack WordPress web design and development services: custom WordPress themes, custom Gutenberg blocks, WordPress plugin development, hardened WordPress security, AI integration, and schema-rich WordPress SEO. We design WordPress sites, build WordPress sites, secure them, and support them, all under one roof.
Engage one or stack the whole dozen. Every line below is staffed by senior engineers in Kansas City, not contractors we hand off to.
Custom block themes drafted in Figma, coded in PHP and theme.json, and shipped without ThemeForest baggage. Your designers get freedom; your editors get guardrails; nobody gets locked into someone else's framework.
Targeted work on themes you already paid for. Broken breakpoints repaired, WCAG gaps closed, render-blocking assets unwound, and new template parts grafted in via a child theme so updates never overwrite us.
Real Gutenberg blocks shipped through @wordpress/scripts. Server-side render where dynamic data demands it, React-driven editor controls when interactivity does, ACF block bindings when speed matters more than ceremony.
Bespoke plugins when the marketplace cannot be trusted with your business logic. PSR-4 namespaces, action and filter hooks named like adults, REST routes with capability checks, and uninstall.php that actually drops its tables.
Full Site Editing executed properly. Design tokens defined once in theme.json, every header/footer split into template parts, locked patterns for the homepage, and zero shortcode soup left over from a Divi past life.
WAF rules tuned to your traffic shape, two-factor on every editor login, abandoned plugins yanked out by their roots, XML-RPC silenced, the wp-admin slug renamed, and restore drills run quarterly so the first one is not in production.
Plugins that wire WordPress into the LLM ecosystem you already pay for. Vector search over your post archive, an in-page assistant that pulls from your services, alt-text on autopilot, and Gravity Forms entries parsed into ACF fields.
Redis object cache in front of wp_options, page cache rules tuned per template, autoload bloat trimmed monthly, post-revisions kept on a leash, and the slow-query log read instead of ignored. The myth that WordPress is slow is mostly a configuration story.
Rank Math or Yoast configured beyond the install wizard, JSON-LD authored by hand per template, breadcrumbs that match the URL hierarchy, and AEO patterns shaped so Perplexity and ChatGPT cite your pages instead of summarizing them away.
Real WooCommerce work. Subscription billing, member-priced catalogs, configurators backed by ACF, gateways beyond Stripe Express, shipping zones that account for real warehouses, and tax setups that survive a Streamlined Sales Tax review.
Lifting your site out of Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Webflow, Drupal, Joomla, an aging static build, or a WordPress install someone else broke. Content imported, slugs preserved, redirects regression-tested, and a documented rollback ready if launch night gets weird.
The launch is the easy part. Monthly retainers cover patch cadence, log review, restore verification, copy and image edits, and a named engineer in your inbox instead of a ticket queue.
Vetted in production, swapped out the moment they go stale, and kept lean enough that wp-admin still loads in under a second. This is the working bench.
Past those twenty there's a deeper bench we pull from when scope calls for it: WP Migrate Pro, Better Search Replace, Duplicator, AffiliateWP, MemberPress, LearnDash, BuddyBoss, Toolset, Meta Box, FacetWP, Search & Filter Pro, Code Snippets, and a dozen more. We install what the brief actually needs and nothing else; every plugin has a runtime cost, and we count them.
Activating the block editor takes one click. Making it productive for a marketing team takes a week of considered work. We do that week so your editors can ship pages on a Tuesday afternoon without breaking the homepage.
Whether you need a full launch, a rebuild, or surgical theme work, the deliverables are itemized in writing and the timeline is the one we mean to hit.
For businesses launching, rebranding, or replacing a non-WordPress CMS.
Typical timeline: 8 to 14 weeks
For tired WordPress sites, page-builder spaghetti, or replatforms from another CMS into modern WordPress.
Typical timeline: 4 to 10 weeks
For sites with a WordPress theme that mostly works but needs surgery.
Typical timeline: 1 to 4 weeks
Almost every breach we have cleaned up traced back to the same three failures: a plugin nobody updated, an admin account without two-factor, and a backup that had not been tested. We close those gaps before the contract starts, then keep them closed.
We code small, well-scoped WordPress plugins and Gutenberg blocks that route your content through OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Gemini. The block editor stops being a publishing form and starts behaving like an assistant.

Posts and pages are embedded into a pgvector or Pinecone index nightly via WP-Cron. Visitors ask questions in plain English; the result is a paragraph answer with linked citations to your own articles. No more clunky default search.

An on-brand chat dock fed your services, FAQ, hours, and pricing rules through retrieval. It answers in your tone, escalates to a human when confidence drops, and writes every transcript back into a custom post type for review.

A custom Gutenberg sidebar panel that proposes titles, meta descriptions, internal link targets, and accessible alt text without leaving the post edit screen. Editors stay in flow; the LLM does the typing.

A submitted Gravity Forms entry hits a parser, gets normalized into typed fields (price, address, availability, intent), and writes the result back into matching ACF fields on a custom post. Inbound chaos becomes clean rows.

A small dashboard widget that answers wp-admin questions using your own runbook as the knowledge base. New marketing hires stop pinging the agency; they ask the toolbar instead.

Templates restructured so the answer comes before the storytelling, FAQ schema attached where it belongs, speakable selectors marked for voice surfaces, and entity facts laid out for LLM crawlers. Pages that get cited, not paraphrased.
WordPress can rank like a freight train or stall like an abandoned blog. The difference comes down to permalink discipline, schema authored by hand, and not letting an SEO plugin auto-pilot your meta system.
Permalinks switched to post-name, category prefixes added only where the IA benefits, dates stripped from URLs, trailing-slash behavior chosen and enforced at the server level. Legacy slugs preserved or 301-mapped one for one.
JSON-LD authored per template by hand, never piped through a plugin's UI: Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Service, FAQPage, Article, Product, Event, Review. Run through the Rich Results Test on every deploy.
OG and X-card metadata authored per post with sensible site-wide fallbacks driven from Rank Math or Yoast. Every shared link arrives in the feed looking like marketing did the work, not like the link preview gave up.
Sitemaps generated by Rank Math or Yoast and trimmed of noise (paginated archives, attachment pages, low-value taxonomy stubs). Dedicated news, video, and image sitemaps stood up when the content actually warrants them.
A custom plugin pulls reviews from the Google Places API on a nightly WP-Cron, stores them in transients with a sensible TTL, and renders Review + AggregateRating schema in the markup. No bloated third-party widget.
Direct Instagram Graph API token wired into a custom block, cached server-side, rendered with proper alt text and native lazy-loading. No SaaS embed that drops out the next time Meta deprecates an endpoint.
LCP held under 2.5s, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200ms. Inlined critical styles, deferred non-critical scripts, fetchpriority on hero media, font-display swap, and WP Rocket settings tuned per template instead of one global preset.
Polylang Pro or WPML driving the editorial translation flow, with hreflang tags emitted in head, sitemap entries grouped by language, and URL strategy chosen between subdirectory or subdomain based on traffic patterns.
Pages restructured to lead with the answer, FAQ schema applied surgically, speakable CSS selectors annotated, and entity-rich facts placed in scannable lists so Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini cite your URL instead of paraphrasing it.
We do not. Pick a monthly retainer or send us hourly tickets. Either way, the same engineer whose name is on the commit history is the one replying.
Right fit for steady sites with low change frequency.
Right fit for growing operations that ship changes monthly.
Right fit for storefronts and platforms where downtime costs real money.
Need something smaller? Send hourly tickets and pay against a prepaid block. We also white-label WordPress engineering for agencies whose roster does not include a senior WP team.
WordPress powers somewhere north of 43% of the indexed web, and that is not a popularity trophy — it is a sign that the open-source codebase, GPL ecosystem, and Gutenberg editor have matured into the most flexible publishing layer available. For sites that need real custom logic, a marketing team that ships content weekly, a WooCommerce storefront, or a learning or membership product without a per-seat SaaS fee, WordPress is usually the right call. When headless is genuinely the better architecture (publishing at huge scale, app-driven product, very specific frontend frameworks) we will say so.
All three. We launch brand-new WordPress sites from kickoff to DNS swap, replatform existing sites that have outgrown their current setup, and run targeted child-theme work on installs you already own. Every project opens with a no-obligation audit so the scope is grounded in your actual codebase, not a generic checklist.
Our working bench includes ACF Pro, Wordfence, UpdraftPlus, Solid Security, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Rank Math, Yoast, Redirection, Smart Slider 3, The Events Calendar, Polylang or WPML, CartFlows, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, Akismet, and Query Monitor. Which subset shows up in your install depends on the brief; we install what your site genuinely needs and leave the rest at the door.
Layered defense in plain terms: a hardened wp-config, a WAF tuned for your traffic, two-factor enforced on every editor account, a plugin policy that retires anything abandoned, nightly off-site snapshots, a file-integrity watcher that alerts via SMS, tightened HTTP headers, and an incident response runbook with named on-call engineers. We schedule restore rehearsals quarterly so the first time we restore your site is never during an actual incident.
Yes, and it is some of our favorite work right now. We code custom plugins and Gutenberg blocks that route content through OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Gemini for vector search, retrieval-grounded chat, automated drafting, summarization, structured-data extraction, and editorial assistants pinned inside wp-admin. The point is to keep humans in the loop, just faster and with more context.
Permalinks set with intent, JSON-LD authored by hand per template type (Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Service, FAQPage, Article, Product when relevant), OG and X-card metadata baked into every layout, sitemaps trimmed of low-value URLs, Core Web Vitals tuned per template, internal linking patterns documented in code, and AEO and GEO structures laid down so LLM-driven search engines have something to cite.
Both ends of the spectrum. We will install and tune a vetted commercial theme on a tight timeline, code a fully custom block theme from theme.json down to the last template part, or layer surgical changes onto your current theme through a properly scoped child theme. Plenty of our retainer clients started as a one-week child-theme rescue.
Yes — ongoing care is how most of our client relationships actually run. Retainers cover the patch cadence, log review, performance reporting, copy edits, backup validation, and a guaranteed response window. Prefer to handle most things in-house? You can also send us hourly tickets against a prepaid block of engineering time.
Replatforms are one of our most repeated engagements. We map old content types into WordPress post types and ACF field groups, port the design into a fresh block theme, stage the import on a clone behind HTTP auth, prove out URL preservation with a documented redirect map, and cut over with a rollback path queued in advance.
Yes, and we ship them properly. Server-rendered blocks where the data is dynamic, React-driven blocks where the editor experience demands it, all packaged via @wordpress/scripts with REST routes, capability checks, settings screens, and translation files. When a respected commercial plugin already nails it, we install that instead of reinventing it.
Yes. WP Rocket or LiteSpeed for asset combining, automatic conversion to WebP and AVIF, hero images preloaded with fetchpriority, critical CSS inlined per template, Redis object cache where the wp_options table benefits, and a CDN in front of static assets. Sites we hand off routinely score 90+ on mobile Lighthouse and pass Core Web Vitals on real-user data.
Book a free WordPress consultation. We open your existing install or sketch your new one, point at the wins worth doing first, and walk you out with a written plan and timeline whether the contract closes or not.
Book a free consultation. No sales loop, no upsell deck. We will tell you what to prioritize, what to ignore, and roughly how many weeks it will take.