About me
Senior WordPress / PHP Developer
14 years of experience · High-traffic WordPress · Performance & Infrastructure
WordPress and PHP developer with 14 years of experience building, maintaining, and optimizing production websites.
For over 7 years, I've worked on a large-scale, 29-language WordPress platform serving up to 1 million monthly visitors. My work spans custom PHP development, A/B testing, performance optimization, multilingual architecture, and AWS infrastructure.
I also develop and maintain independent WordPress plugins used by thousands of websites.
Open to full/part-time remote opportunities.
Key work
PPC & landing pages
Created and improved PPC landing pages for paid traffic: layout, page variants, and iteration based on A/B test results.
Multilingual platform at scale
Supported and extended a 29-language WordPress site built on WPML and ACF: content structure, field groups, translation-ready templates, and RTL layout issues.
A/B testing system
Developed the company's in-house A/B testing system. The first version was built for the main site, then reused on our other sites and became a core internal module. Tests run on one page or many: JavaScript, affiliate-link and server-side experiments, the type used most in recent years. Server-side tests run on Nginx + Lua, so split logic is handled before the request reaches PHP.
Redirect management
Rewrote and extended parts of the in-house redirect module that manages about 13,000 redirects across the 29-language site. Redirect data is served through Redis, so lookups stay fast under high traffic.
Performance & high load
Nginx, Redis, PHP and WordPress under traffic of up to ~1M visitors a month. PageSpeed optimization, database query tuning, page cache and cache-cleaning tooling. Over the past year, reworked server configurations on top of the original setup.
AWS administration & cost optimization
Hands-on AWS administration: launching and resizing servers, Auto Scaling groups, target groups, load balancers, access keys. With a colleague, cut spend from about $7.5K to $3.8K per month by right-sizing databases, servers, disks and Redis.
Experience
- Develop and maintain a high-traffic WordPress platform supporting 29 languages, including RTL layouts and multilingual content infrastructure.
- Design and implement custom PHP features, PPC landing pages, internal tools, and integrations.
- Built an in-house A/B testing platform using Nginx, Lua, JavaScript and PHP.
- Improve application performance through MySQL, Redis, Nginx and PHP-FPM optimization.
- Maintain and optimize AWS infrastructure, contributing to a ~49% reduction in infrastructure costs.
- Led the PHP 7.4 to 8.3 migration and upgraded application dependencies.
- Use AI coding agents and modern development tools to accelerate implementation and maintenance.
- WordPress plugin development and site customization (WooCommerce, WPML).
- Site speed optimization.
- Integrations: PayPal, Spotify, Dropbox, Facebook Graph API, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, YouTube API, Cloudinary.
- Building pages from existing landing-page designs.
Projects
vpnmentor.com
Main project · 8 yearsA large multilingual VPN and cybersecurity review website. PPC pages, A/B testing, performance, infrastructure and multilingual structure.
vpnmentor.com →WP Foto Vote
WordPress plugin ecosystemA photo contest plugin with a family of add-ons: paid votes, Hot or Not, many gallery types and styles, flexible voting settings. It grew from a single plugin into a small ecosystem and is still maintained and updated.
wp-vote.net →Ajax Login and Registration Modal Popup
WordPress pluginLogin and registration in a modal window without page reloads. 3,000+ installs on WordPress.org.
wordpress.org →Lebenslaufdesigns.de
Built from scratch with the client and developed for over 10 years since. Used to run a WooCommerce shop with paid templates; today it offers free downloadable templates, while paid ones are sold through Bewerbung.ai.
lebenslaufdesigns.de →Bewerbung.ai
CV templates site and AI résumé builder app. A ready-made design implemented on WordPress and customized. Built recently, with AI-assisted development.
bewerbung.ai →Reviews
"Awesome WP contest plugin and the best support I've ever had from a plugin developer. Highly recommended! We need more developers like Maxim."
"Great plugin and very professional programmer!!! I am totally happy with his work! Very accurate with passion for his work! He also have good ideas to improve our project!!! Thank you Maxim!!!"