About
Sixteen years, one repeated problem
I'm Zura — a full-stack web developer and SEO specialist, writing production code since 2010. Most of my work arrives as the same sentence: the site has become slow, and nobody can work out why.
The stack is picked per job, not per habit. A lot of what I have shipped is WordPress. Plenty of it was not — hand-coded PHP, Joomla, OpenCart, DataLife Engine. The right answer is the tool that fits the business, not the one I happen to install fastest.
I don't experiment on client sites. I have seen nearly every way a site can be broken — bloated page builders, 40-plugin stacks, unindexed databases, cheap hosting — and I fix the cause rather than the symptom. Every project ends with before and after numbers: load times, PageSpeed scores, Core Web Vitals.
The rare part is that the developer and the SEO are the same person. Schema markup, site architecture and page speed are where the two meet, and that overlap is the whole specialty — nothing is lost in a handover because there isn't one.
I work remotely on hours that overlap US mornings. Clients keep coming back; several have been with me for years.
- 16+
- Years of development
- 100+
- Projects delivered
- 14+
- Years of SEO
- 4
- Countries served
The years
From the first line to what I build now
Sixteen years, six turns. Each one changed what the work was, not just how much of it there was.
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2010 The practice starts
February 2010: the first client site goes live. Hand-written PHP and MySQL, no framework, no page builder, no safety net — which is still the reason I can read someone else's broken theme at three in the morning and know what it is doing. Freelance and self-employed every year since.
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2012 SEO becomes half the job
Fast sites that nobody could find taught me the other half. Professional SEO from this year on — technical, on-page and off-page. A developer who builds the site and then ranks it is a combination I have almost never had to compete with: the two jobs argue with each other, and here there is nobody to argue with.
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2014 Local search
Specialized in local SEO for service businesses: Google Business Profile, citations, review management, Maps ranking. Electricians, clinics, furniture makers, bakeries. The number that mattered was phone calls and walk-ins, never impressions.
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2015 — 2023 The decade of sites
The stretch that produced most of the hundred: clients across the USA, Europe, Russia and Panama. Custom themes and plugins, WooCommerce stores taking real payments, migrations off Joomla, OpenCart and DataLife Engine with nothing lost. Speed became the specialty here — twenty-second loads brought under a second and a half, at the code, the database and the server.
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2024 AI enters the workflow
I started learning and working with AI seriously — not as a novelty on the side, but as the next level of this craft. The way software gets written changed, and after fourteen years of watching tools come and go this one was plainly not a fashion. I would rather be early than explain later why I waited.
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2026 Where the work is now
Claude is in the day, every day: more projects finished, at higher precision, held to the same review standard as everything before it. Grok, Qwen and whatever earns its place next sit alongside it. Most of my time outside client work goes into automating the repeatable parts of it — that is where the next ten years of this job are, and I intend to already be there.
Track record
What that adds up to
Freelance, self-employed, February 2010 to now. The list below is the work itself, not the job title.
Speed
Load times cut from 20 seconds to under 1.5, fixed at the code, database and server level rather than hidden behind a cache.
Rankings
Positions 1–6 on Google for healthcare, furniture manufacturing, electrician services and classifieds platforms.
Local
Service businesses ranked in Google Maps and local search — phone calls and walk-ins, not impressions.
Builds
Original designs, full redesigns, custom themes and plugins, and stores that handle real payments and delivery.
Migrations
Sites moved between CMS platforms and between hosts with zero downtime and nothing lost.
Clients
Not my word for any of it
Written by people who are still clients — several of them years later.
Selected work
Three of them, still live
Every case study names the site and shows the before and after on the same tests.
Remodeling Montana — Modern Site and Ongoing Local SEO
Lorena Palombo — Plant-Based Retreat Chef
Working together
Send the URL, skip the call
Reply within 24 hours, usually sooner. Staging first, full backup, nothing live until you approve it.
Sixteen years of work for businesses in four countries
