Every year someone writes a “tools we use” post and lists whatever’s trending on Product Hunt. This isn’t that. This is an honest account of what actually runs our WordPress development work in 2025 — including the things we tried, abandoned, and why.

We’ve been asked more than once why we’re not on Webflow or Framer. The honest answer is that our clients need to own and edit their content long after we hand over the keys. WordPress gives them that. Impreza gives us a builder layer that’s fast to work in without hiding the underlying markup. We could go faster with a headless setup — but not on the budgets our clients actually have.

Every project lives in a private GitHub repository from day one. DeployHQ handles the push-to-deploy pipeline — we maintain three environments (local, staging, production) and nothing touches production without a staging review. The setup took two hours to configure the first time; it has saved us from at least a dozen catastrophic mistakes since.

We don’t use the WordPress admin to edit code. Ever. If you’re FTP-ing files directly to a live site in 2025, please stop.

LocalWP replaced our old MAMP/WAMP setup three years ago and we haven’t looked back. Instant site creation, one-click live links for client reviews, and a database manager that doesn’t require phpMyAdmin. It’s free for everything we need.

We tried WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache. We now use Perfmatters for script management and asset optimisation, and route static assets through Bunny CDN. The combination is cheaper than managed caching plugins and gives us more granular control. Most of our sites score above 90 on PageSpeed mobile — not because of any single plugin, but because we optimise at every layer from image export to server config.

The most important tool in our stack isn’t a piece of software — it’s the deployment process. Tools change; the discipline of never skipping staging, never editing live, never shipping untested code is what keeps our error rate near zero. Invest in your process before you invest in your plugins.

Our stack in 2025 costs less than it did in 2021 and produces better results. The trend we’ve noticed: simpler, more focused tools beat feature-heavy platforms every time once you know what you actually need.