WordPress development that stays fast in production

Both. A large share of the work is inherited sites. A theme someone else wrote, a plugin stack nobody documented, an admin that has slowed to a crawl. I audit first, tell you what is worth keeping, and quote the fix rather than a rebuild.

No. I build custom themes with ACF or native blocks so editors get named, constrained fields instead of a blank canvas. If you already run Elementor or Divi and want to keep it, I will work inside it rather than force a migration.

Small scoped work (a plugin conflict, a broken checkout, an admin performance problem) is usually a few days. A custom theme build is measured in weeks. Either way you get a fixed price for a defined scope after a short audit, so you are not buying open-ended hours and the number does not move once work starts.

Yes, and it is part of the scope rather than an extra. You get the local setup, the deploy path, what each custom field does, and which plugins matter. The test is whether another developer can pick it up without calling me.