A WordPress Team Worth Inviting to Tender

A tender response should answer the question that was asked, in the order it was asked, with evidence behind each claim. Ours covers the technical approach to the build, the team who will deliver it, recent and relevant examples of comparable work, a clear breakdown of cost and timeline, and the operational sections a tender usually includes around accessibility, security, data protection and ongoing support.

Where a tender asks for supporting material, we provide what is requested rather than a generic capability pack stapled to the front. If your process runs through a procurement portal with its own templates and deadlines, we work to those rather than to ours.

Fixed pricing matters more in a tender than almost anywhere else, because it is what makes competing bids comparable and what protects the budget once the work starts. We price against a defined scope rather than an open-ended day rate, which means the figure in our response is the figure you pay, not an estimate that drifts once the build is underway.

We scope the functionality properly before we price it, and we flag anything that needs a decision before it becomes expensive. The timeline is given alongside the cost, and if something is going to move it, you hear that early rather than at the point it already has.

On a tendered project in particular, the supplier who builds the site is often not the one maintaining it a few years later, so the build has to stand on its own. We build custom themes rather than bending a commercial theme into shape, keep the plugin count low because every plugin is a dependency someone else controls, and write clean, documented code another developer can read.

Where a site needs behaviour WordPress does not offer out of the box, we write a bespoke plugin rather than stacking third party ones that overlap. That keeps the functionality intact through a future redesign. The broader reasoning behind building this way is covered on our website design and development page.

Public sector and education tenders almost always carry accessibility, security and data protection requirements, and they are reasonable to ask of any build. We build to recognised accessibility standards rather than retrofitting them, keep the plugin set small and current, keep WordPress and PHP up to date, and handle personal data and cookie consent and GDPR setup properly rather than dropping in a banner that blocks nothing.

We answer the specific questions a tender raises on each of these rather than waving them through, and where a connection to another system is part of the requirement, we build it directly against each vendor's own API rather than relying on automation tools that fail quietly.

Most WordPress tenders include a support and maintenance requirement, and with good reason: a site changes shape after launch as plugins update, WordPress ships new versions, and the organisation asks for changes. Left alone, that is how a site drifts into being slow or insecure, usually noticed at the worst moment.

We can hand a site over cleanly and step away, or stay on through WordPress support retainers covering updates, monitoring, backups and a set amount of development time each month, so there is a developer to call rather than a scramble when something breaks.

Not every tender respondent is the end client. Agencies that win or bid for WordPress projects, but do not want to carry permanent development staff, use us as their build team. The arrangement is set out on our white label WordPress development page: we deliver invisibly, the client relationship stays entirely yours, and the technical standards are identical to our direct work.

Where a requirement is closer to an application with users, permissions and workflows than to a website, that is portal and platform development, which we build on Laravel. We will tell you when a tender has crossed that line rather than pushing WordPress somewhere it does not belong.