WordPress development services, without a page builder in sight.
Dice Codes is a digital agency in Punjab. Websites, online stores, search, advertising, brand and AI, built for businesses across Punjab and India.
WordPress powers roughly 43 per cent of the web, and most of it is slow for one avoidable reason: page builders. A builder loads a stylesheet and a script for every widget in its library on every page, whether that page uses them or not. We build custom blocks instead. You still edit everything visually, the editing experience is arguably better, and the page ships only the code it needs. That single decision is usually the difference between a two second load and a nine second one.
What we build in WordPress
Custom themes and blocks, never a bought theme with plugins stacked on top until it does roughly what you wanted.
Custom themes
Built for your content, not adapted from a demo. A bought theme carries the code for every layout it advertises, including the twenty you will never use, and you pay for that on every page load forever.
Custom Gutenberg blocks
One block per section type, registered properly and rendered on the server. Editors get visual editing with live preview; the page gets clean markup with no wrapper divs.
Locked page templates
Pages are assembled with their sections in the right order and locked to content-only editing. You can change any word or image. You cannot accidentally delete a section, reorder the page or break the heading structure the SEO depends on.
WooCommerce
When a store belongs on WordPress rather than Shopify. Payments, shipping and GST configured for India, with product schema so listings can win rich results.
Speed work on existing sites
We audit what is loading and why, then remove it. Often this means replacing a builder-assembled page with real blocks, which is slower to do and permanent once done.
Migrations and rescues
Moving off Wix, Squarespace or a builder-heavy WordPress install, with every URL mapped so rankings survive the move.
Why page builders are slow, specifically
Not an opinion. This is a mechanical consequence of how they are designed, and it is worth understanding before you buy either approach.
A page builder cannot know in advance which of its widgets a page will use, because you might add one at any moment. Its safe option is to load the stylesheet and script for all of them on every page. That is why a builder site typically makes 50 to 100 requests where a hand-built one makes five, and why its CSS runs to hundreds of kilobytes of rules the page never applies.
The second cost is structural. Builder layouts are stored as shortcodes or as the builder’s own JSON, not as content. Deactivate the plugin and your pages become unreadable markup. That is not a hypothetical: it is what makes leaving a builder expensive, and it is the reason the licence renews every year.
| Measured on the previous version of this site | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| CSS files | 26 | 1 |
| JavaScript files | 50 | 2 |
| Total requests | 98 | 5 |
| HTML per page | 314 to 488 KB | Under 60 KB |
| DOM nodes | 2,534 | 435 |
| Time to content | About 6.5 seconds | Under 200 ms |
WordPress questions
Is WordPress still a good choice in 2026?
Yes, for content-led sites and service businesses. It is free, you own it, the editing experience is familiar to almost everyone, and there is no platform fee that grows with you. Its reputation for being slow comes from how it is usually built, not from WordPress itself.
Can you make my existing WordPress site faster?
Usually, and the audit will tell you by how much before you commit. If the site is built on a page builder there is a ceiling, because the builder will keep loading its library no matter what we cache. Getting past that ceiling means rebuilding the templates, which we quote separately and honestly.
Will removing Elementor break my site?
It would if we simply deactivated it, because the layouts are stored as Elementor data. That is why a rebuild recreates each page as blocks first, on staging, and Elementor is only removed once every page renders correctly without it.
Do I still need caching plugins?
Far less than you would think, and on some hosts not at all. Most of what a caching plugin does is undo the damage a page builder caused. When a page is already one stylesheet and two scripts, there is little left for a plugin to optimise, and stacking one on top can cause more problems than it solves.
Send us the URL
We will tell you what is loading, why, and what it would cost to fix. Two working days.