Case Studies: WordPress Engagements with Measured Outcomes

Portfolio entries are project snapshots — what got built, the constraint that drove the call, what shipped. Case studies are post-mortem essays — the same projects pulled apart on the table afterwards: the trade-off I made and why, the thing that did not work and what we did instead, the outcome measured three months later. If you want to scan delivered work, the portfolio is faster. If you want to read how a decision held up over time, this is the page.

It depends on the engagement and what the client agreed to make public. Where the client signed off on attribution, the case study names them and the people involved. Where the work touched something sensitive — a contentious platform migration, a vendor dispute, an editorial workflow that broke under load — the study is written anonymously and the technical detail stays. I never name a client, person, or engagement detail without prior written consent.

Yes. The discovery call is the right place to start; reference the case study that resembles what you are trying to ship and the call gets fifteen minutes shorter. From there it follows the normal path — level-matched audit, scope at a fixed band, delivery in weeks. Several of these projects started with a paid $2,200 deep audit before anyone committed to a build; if your situation looks like that, say so on the call.

A case study takes two consents and one quiet quarter. The client has to agree to the write-up, the timing has to be far enough past launch that the outcome is measurable rather than hopeful, and I have to make the time to actually write it. Most engagements stay on the portfolio instead because at least one of those three things did not line up. The studies that do land here are the ones where all three did.

Mostly mid-four to low-five figures of paid work, sometimes higher. The decision about whether something becomes a case study is not about the price tag — it is about whether there is an architectural call, trade-off, or migration story worth pulling apart. A $5,000 audit that prevented a six-figure migration mistake is more interesting case-study material than a routine implementation at four times the size.