WooCommerce
Development Services

How the Development Retainer Works

Development uses the same release safety and measurement standards as the CRO Programme, but priorities are set with you. Our role is to help you invest your monthly time budget in the highest impact order, while still building what the business needs.

Who This Is For

This retainer is designed for established WooCommerce brands with product market fit, stable trading and enough traffic for meaningful optimisation.

• WooCommerce site with consistent trading and meaningful session volume.
• A functioning acquisition engine such as paid search, SEO, email, affiliates, or partnerships.
• Willingness to grant access to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and align on baseline measurement rules.
• Openness to controlled releases and avoiding conflicting changes during agreed windows.

What Is Included

• StrategyFive Platform, plus maintenance and performance work.
• A monthly time budget for CRO analysis, development, QA, releases, and reporting.
• CRO expertise to prioritise the highest impact work first.
• Transparent time tracking, weekly updates, and monthly time reporting.

What Is Not Included

• Uncapped work. Any work beyond the monthly time budget needs written approval first and is billed at £75 per hour plus VAT.
• Uplift guarantees. Performance reporting is insight, not a contractual success threshold.

StrategyFive Platform Is Required

StrategyFive Platform is the managed WordPress and WooCommerce environment that underpins both pathways. It is a delivery system for performance, stability, safe releases and measurable optimisation, not generic hosting.

• Managed hosting, maintenance, security hardening, and updates.
• Staging environments for QA and controlled releases.
• Daily backups and tested restore procedures.
• Monitoring and alerting, with clear incident response routines.
• Caching and performance tooling tuned for WooCommerce behaviour.
• Standardised approach to Core Web Vitals and technical hygiene.

How Time Budgets and Governance Work

• You own priorities. StrategyFive advises on conversion impact, technical risk, and sequencing.
• Billing is monthly in arrears. Time is tracked in 30 minute increments, including meetings, planning, and reporting.
• Your monthly fee is a budget cap and includes the time budget stated for the tier.
• Unused time can roll over into the next month only, and can be borrowed forward by up to one month.
• On termination, any unused hours are refunded.
• StrategyFive guarantees the quality of its own work. If something StrategyFive built breaks, StrategyFive fixes it.
• Support is provided during UK business hours as standard, Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30, excluding UK public holidays.
• For priority one incidents, clients can escalate via email and telephone.

How We Deliver Safely

• Staging first for all meaningful changes.
• Controlled releases within an agreed release window.
• Rollback readiness for higher risk changes.
• Post release checks for tracking, performance and checkout flows.
• Monitoring and error logging to reduce incident frequency and improve response time.
• WooCommerce best practice development patterns: use hooks where possible, keep template overrides minimal, and never modify core plugin files.

Onboarding and Reporting

• Confirm access, environments, and staging workflow.
• Agree the month one priorities and the monthly cap.
• Create a backlog list and agree a definition of done for releases.
• Confirm time tracking and reporting cadence.
• GA4 is the source of truth for performance validation. Development reporting is insight, not a guarantee.
• Weekly written update via the StrategyFive dashboard, including what shipped, what is next, and time used.
• Monthly time report by category, with remaining hours carried into the next month if applicable.

Typical Tiers

• Platform only: £250 per month plus VAT. Development is billed at £75 per hour plus VAT.
• Essentials: £1,750 per month plus VAT. Includes platform plus 20 hours per month.
• Growth: £2,750 per month plus VAT. Includes platform plus 35 hours per month.
• Scale: £4,500 per month plus VAT. Includes platform plus 65 hours per month.
• Enterprise: £9,000 per month plus VAT. Includes platform plus 135 hours per month.

You can review pricing and choose a tier on the development pricing page.