Custom WordPress plugins for the things off-the-shelf nearly does.

Custom WordPress development for businesses whose workflow doesn’t fit a plugin directory. When you’ve installed three plugins to almost do one job, we build the one that actually does it, cleanly, securely, and built to survive updates.

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★★★★★ Rated on Trustpilot & Google · The people who write the code

When custom is right

The four signs you’ve outgrown off-the-shelf

Plugin stacking

Three plugins, two workarounds and a spreadsheet to do one job. Each update risks the whole tower, and nobody remembers how it balances.

Manual re-typing

Orders copied into another system, data exported and re-imported weekly. If a human moves data between two screens, code should be doing it.

The missing feature

Your product needs a calculator, configurator, booking rule or checkout behaviour no directory plugin offers, because it’s specific to how you trade.

API islands

Your site, your CRM, your supplier feeds and your accounts package all hold a piece of the truth, and none of them talk to each other.

Built and trading

Custom WordPress functionality we run in production

Not portfolio mockups, systems taking real orders and serving real data today, on platforms we also operate ourselves.

Ecommerce engine

Live number plate builder

A real-time product designer with style, size and pricing logic, driving complete plate ecommerce for UK retailers.

Big data

72M-record DVLA search

Personalised plate search across 72 million DVLA registrations, with AI-assisted valuation engines, served fast enough to browse.

Platform

Competition Engine

Provably fair draws, instant wins, wallets and compliance tooling, a full prize-competition platform on WooCommerce.

How a build runs

From "could you build…?" to shipped and supported

Step 1

Scope in plain English

We map what the plugin must do, what it talks to, and what done looks like, written down before any code.

Step 2

Fixed written quote

A price and timeline you can hold us to. No day-rate meters running quietly in the background.

Step 3

Build & test properly

Clean, documented code following WordPress standards, tested against updates and edge cases before it touches your live site.

Step 4

Ship & support

Deployed, monitored, and maintained, by choice on one of our care plans, so it keeps working as WordPress evolves.

What we build

The shapes custom WordPress development takes

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Integrations

Your site talking to your CRM, accounts package, supplier feeds or courier APIs, data flowing without a human re-typing it.

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Calculators & configurators

Quote engines, product designers and pricing logic your customers use themselves, like our live plate builders.

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Workflow automation

Order paperwork, document collection, notifications and approvals handled by code instead of your inbox.

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WooCommerce extensions

Checkout behaviours, product types and pricing rules WooCommerce doesn’t do out of the box.

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Admin consoles

Simplified, branded dashboards so your team manages the business without wading through WordPress admin.

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Data at scale

Search and valuation across millions of records, built and hosted so it stays fast, like our 72M-plate DVLA search.

Recent work

Plugins we have built for real businesses lately

A few of the systems that now run day to day for our clients. We have kept the businesses anonymous, but the problems and the solutions are exactly as they were. Every one started as a job an off-the-shelf plugin nearly did.

Automotive retail

A private number plate search and checkout platform

A registration retailer needed customers to search tens of millions of DVLA registrations, see live pricing and buy or gift a plate in one flow, with the legal paperwork handled behind the scenes.

A search API and database layer holding 72 million records, live vehicle lookups, a pricing engine with service fees and transfer charges, gift and express checkout, and a pre-owned marketplace, all inside WooCommerce with branded transactional emails.

✓

72-million-record search that answers in milliseconds

✓

DVLA fee, VAT and transfer handling built into checkout

✓

Gift purchases and express checkout without leaving the page

✓

Customer account area for transfers and documents

Prize competitions

A provably fair competition and prize-draw engine

A competition business needed to sell tickets at volume - thousands in minutes - with instant wins, site credit and draws that customers could verify, without relying on a third-party plugin that could vanish.

A WooCommerce competition product type with its own database schema: pre-generated, cryptographically shuffled ticket pools; atomic allocation that is safe under concurrent purchases and payment webhooks; per-customer limits enforced at cart and allocation; instant wins, wallet credits, audit logging and provably fair draws.

✓

Atomic ticket allocation safe under heavy concurrent load

✓

Instant wins and site credit wallets

✓

Provably fair draws customers can check

✓

Full audit trail for compliance

A provably fair competition and prize-draw engine

Manufacturing and ecommerce

A number plate and surround configurator

A plate manufacturer wanted customers to design road-legal plates and matching surrounds on screen, see exactly what they would receive, and buy in a click.

A self-contained live-preview builder that renders the plate as the customer types, enforces BS AU 145e layouts, adds borders, badges and 3D or 4D lettering, and passes a manufacturing-ready specification into the WooCommerce order. A companion surround configurator works standalone or as an upsell.

✓

Pixel-accurate live preview of the finished plate

✓

Road-legal rules enforced in the builder, not at the factory

✓

Manufacturing spec attached to every order line

✓

Same builder reused across several retail sites

Industrial services

An inspection reporting portal with client dashboards

An inspection company was running its reporting through forms, spreadsheets and email. Inspectors needed to work on site, sometimes offline; clients needed their reports, floor plans and history in one place.

A portal that turns form submissions into structured inspection records per company and site: an areas editor and floor-plan tool, signature capture, offline drafts that sync, branded PDF report generation, a private file library with previews and download permissions, client onboarding, and front-end dashboards for inspectors, managers and clients.

✓

Inspectors work offline and sync later

✓

Branded PDF reports generated automatically

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Per-client dashboards with history and files

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Bulk import of years of legacy records

Industrial equipment

Spare parts enquiries, pallet shipping and shopping feeds

An equipment retailer sold priced products and unpriced spare parts side by side, shipped by the pallet, and wanted to be in Google Shopping without hand-maintaining a feed.

Three plugins working together: spare-parts products that switch to an enquiry-list flow with managed enquiries and branded emails; a pallet shipping method that calculates by pallet spaces, postcode zone and a rate table; and a Google Merchant Centre feed with weight-based shipping estimates, brand surcharges and automatic category mapping.

Enquiry-list checkout for unpriced parts
Pallet-space shipping by postcode zone
Merchant Centre feed that maintains itself
All native WooCommerce, no marketplace fees

Ecommerce operations

Store tooling: filtering, search insight and spam control

Busy WooCommerce stores were leaning on heavy third-party plugins for filtering, had no idea what customers searched for, and were drowning in fake sign-ups.

A fast, SEO-friendly AJAX product filter built as a drop-in replacement for a bloated commercial plugin; a search logger that tracks terms and trends and lets the store redirect searches to the right page; and a spam-management tool that scores accounts and bulk-cleans fake customers while protecting real ones.

Filter pages that rank and load fast
Search trends turned into redirects and content
Spam scoring across IP, domain and behaviour
Lighter than the plugins they replaced

And more

Other plugins and tools from the last year or two

Directories, data hubs, configurators, dashboards and the AI tooling we use ourselves. If your problem rhymes with one of these, we have probably solved most of it already.

Automotive retailA plate valuation tool and a wanted-plate marketplaceA valuation model grounded in our own DVLA movement data and search-demand statistics, delivered as a shortcode tool; and a sourcing marketplace where a buyer posts a wanted…

directory plugin — Professional servicesA paid directory of engineers and consultanciesTiered listings sold through WooCommerce memberships, claim-your-listing flows, verified badges, featured placements, lead capture with notifications, reviews, faceted search and an analytics view so each listing can see…

crypto api work — Finance mediaA cryptocurrency data hub with live dashboardsA multi-provider data layer that pulls from several market APIs with fallbacks and caching, scheduled refreshes, a coin post type with generated detail pages, rich-list and market dashboards,…

van or room layout designer — Vehicle conversionsA drag-and-drop campervan layout designerAn interactive floor-plan designer with drag-and-drop furniture, per-model van outlines, a day and night mode to show beds and seating, and a shareable result the sales team can…

Our managed clientsA branded client dashboard for managed WordPress sitesA full-width tabbed dashboard that replaces the default: a branded welcome, cache purge, security and Core Web Vitals overview, activity log, analytics and marketing tabs, automated housekeeping tasks…

Social posting and tracking hub — Marketing automationAI content, social publishing and page editing toolsAn AI content pipeline that turns pages into on-brand social posts and banners, publishes to Google Business Profile and social channels on a schedule and remembers what it…

How it’s priced

Plugins are priced as plugins, not as websites

Get a fixed quote →

A site that nearly does what you need does not need a new site; it needs the missing piece written properly. We price that piece, and we keep whole rebuilds as a separate, clearly larger job.

Plugin and functionality work

£250 + VAT

Most custom development is a piece of functionality added to a site or store you already have: a custom product type, a pricing rule, a shipping method, a feed, an integration, a fix. Quoted fixed from a short description; the larger or more complex the plugin, the larger the price.

What moves the price

How many parts of the store it touches
Whether it needs its own admin screens or data
Integrations with systems outside the site
Testing on a staging copy of your store
Ongoing care so it moves with WooCommerce

A whole new site or store

£1,500 + VAT

Building or rebuilding a complete website or store is a different job: design, content, checkout, hosting and the functionality above, together. Quoted as a bespoke build from your brief; ecommerce from £2,500.

Not sure which you need? Describe what the store should do that it does not do today; we will tell you whether it is a feature or a rebuild, and price it either way.

Describe the feature you need How all our pricing works

Looking for something bigger? Need a whole platform rather than a plugin - portals, integrations, custom applications? See our custom web development service →

Code you’re not hostage to

How we keep custom work an asset, not a liability

Custom code has a bad name because of how it’s often written: undocumented, tangled into the theme, dependent on the one developer who wrote it. When they move on, the business is hostage to code nobody else will touch.

We write plugins the way WordPress intends: standalone, standards-compliant and documented, so they survive theme changes and core updates, and any competent developer could pick them up.

Every build ships with plain-English documentation of what it does and how to use it. Updates and compatibility are covered under our care plans, the same way we maintain our own trading platforms.

And because we run production systems on this code ourselves, reliability isn’t a promise, it’s a habit. Code that takes real orders at 2am gets written differently.

Straight answers

Custom development questions

How much does a custom plugin cost?

Small automations and integrations sit at the affordable end; full product configurators and data platforms cost more. Every job is scoped and quoted fixed, in writing, before code is written, and if an off-the-shelf plugin genuinely covers you, we’ll point at it and save you the money.

Who owns the code?

For bespoke client builds, you do, delivered documented, with the code on your site. Where a build licenses one of our existing platforms, the split is agreed plainly in writing up front.

Will it break when WordPress updates?

Built to standards, plugins survive routine updates, and ours are tested against new WordPress and WooCommerce versions as part of care plans. That’s the difference between engineering and the snippet-paste that gave custom code its reputation.

Can you fix or extend a plugin another developer built?

Usually, yes. We’ll audit it first and tell you honestly whether it’s worth extending or cheaper to rebuild properly, with the trade-offs in plain English.

Tell us the job. We’ll build the tool.

Describe the workflow that eats your week or the feature your site is missing. We’ll tell you honestly whether it needs custom code, and what it would cost, within one working day.

Discuss a build Ask a question first

Call us01553 341 334

Emailcontact@rivmedia.co.uk

Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm · Kings Lynn, Norfolk · Replies within one working day.