WordPress Web Designer in Chicago
Looking for a WordPress web designer in Chicago who builds custom sites you can actually manage yourself?
I’m John Schuster — a freelance WordPress designer and developer based in Chicago, creating custom themes and fast, secure websites for local businesses. You get a site that’s designed around your brand, built on the platform that powers a huge share of the web, and easy to update long after launch.
For more than 25 years I’ve designed and built websites for Chicago businesses, and I build the vast majority of them on WordPress, because it gives you ownership, flexibility, and room to grow without locking you into a closed platform.
WordPress services for Chicago businesses
Custom WordPress design — a layout and theme built around your brand and your customers, not a stock template with your logo dropped in
WordPress rebuilds and redesigns — moving a slow, dated, or hard-to-edit site onto a clean, modern build without losing your content or your rankings
WooCommerce stores — product pages, checkout, and payments set up so selling online is simple for you and your customers
Maintenance and updates — core, theme, and plugin updates tested before they touch your live site, plus backups and fixes when something breaks
Speed, security, and SEO basics — fast pages, sensible structure, and clean markup so search engines and visitors both get what they need
A site you can edit yourself
The point of WordPress is that you shouldn’t need a developer to change a phone number or publish a post. Every site I build is handed over with the editing tools set up for the way you work: pages you can update visually, reusable sections, and a short walkthrough so you know where everything lives. When you do want help, you call the person who built it.
Recent WordPress work
A contractor site built around lead capture, turning local searches into quote requests.
A fast, image-heavy site for a Chicago salon-suite business that stays quick even with rich visuals.
A polished, detail-focused build for a specialty retail business.
Why hire a freelance WordPress designer instead of an agency
With an agency, your project passes through a salesperson, a project manager, a designer, and a developer, and the invoice covers all of them. With me you work directly with the person designing and building your site, from the first conversation to launch and after.
Direct communication — you talk to the person doing the work
Faster turnaround — no hand-offs or internal queues
Fixed quotes — you know the full cost before work starts
Still here after launch — updates, fixes, and new features from someone who knows your site
Need custom functionality?
If your project is more about integrations, custom features, or fixing a site that can’t do what you need, see my Chicago web developer page. Thinking about a decoupled front end? Read about headless WordPress.
How I work now
AI-assisted tools let me check far more of a site than a manual sample, and check changes before and after they are made. For you that means a private review site, a written record of what was checked, a timeline agreed up front, and one experienced person reviewing everything from start to finish. Read how I use AI, see AI-assisted web development, or keep your site healthy after launch with Site Care.
