I’m Yax. I’ve spent nine years inside the CMS landscape — Webflow, Framer, Wix Studio, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, Squarespace, WooCommerce, Strapi, Contentful — building sites and storefronts for D2C brands, B2B distributors, agencies, and founders. This page is the longer version of why.
How I got here
I started building WordPress sites in 2017, freelancing through college. The work was unglamorous — small business marketing sites, restaurant menus, a few barber shops. But it taught me the actual job, which is figuring out what someone needs and shipping it.
By 2019 I was working with agencies on bigger WP builds. By 2020 I’d added Shopify because every D2C client wanted it. By 2022, Webflow + Framer because the design-led market demanded both. By 2024, headless WP + Next.js + Strapi because edge performance had become a real requirement, not a nice-to-have. Each platform got added because a client needed it, not because I wanted a new toy.
The thread through all of it: I built a career being the person who could honestly tell a client “this CMS is wrong for you, here’s the right one” — and then build it on the right one.
What I believe about CMS work
The platform should fit the team, not the other way around
Most CMS choices fail because someone picked a platform that fit their resume and forced the team to adapt. Marketing teams who can’t ship pages without engineering. Engineers who can’t update copy without rebuilding. Founders locked into a platform their last agency picked four years ago. The platform should serve the people who use it daily, not the person who built it once.
Page builders are a tax on the future
I won’t use Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Beaver Builder, Brizy, or Oxygen on a paid project. The performance cost is real, the migration cost is bigger, and the maintenance cost is constant. I’ve spent more time cleaning up page-builder sites than I have building greenfield ones — that’s where the conviction comes from.
Performance is a discipline, not a setting
Lighthouse 95+ is achievable on every platform if you treat it as a constraint from commit one. It’s not achievable retrofitted onto a bloated build. Every project I take on starts with a performance budget, ends with one, and never ships outside it. The site you’re reading is itself proof: hand-written WordPress block theme, no builders, Lighthouse 100.
Conversion is the brief
Beautiful is table stakes. Beautiful that doesn’t sell is a portfolio piece, not a deliverable. Every section, every interaction, every line of copy I touch on a paid project is built around the metric that earns it — signup rate, cart conversion, qualified inbound, completion of the next step. If we don’t agree on the metric, we don’t ship.
How I work
- Solo, by design. No subcontractors, no project managers between us, no offshore teams getting briefs translated through three layers. You email me, I reply.
- Capacity-limited. I take on 4–6 client engagements per year + 2 retained agency partners. Past that, the work quality drops.
- Async-first. Loom over Zoom. Notion over slide decks. Friday demo videos over weekly status calls.
- Long-feedback-loop friendly. Briefs that have to be turned around in 24 hours rarely produce great work. Briefs with 2-week feedback windows almost always do.
Tools I actually use
Editor: VS Code with a custom snippets library + GitHub Copilot. Design: Figma + Framer for prototypes. Local dev: Local by Flywheel for WP, Shopify CLI 3 for Shopify. Deploy: Rocket.net or Kinsta for managed WP, Vercel + Cloudflare Pages for headless. Comms: Slack Connect with clients, Loom for demos, Notion for briefs.
Outside the work
Cycling. Long-form essays. Coffee. The occasional climb. None of that has anything to do with CMS work, and that’s the point — having a non-work life is what keeps the work life sharp.
Where to find me
Email is fastest: hello@cmsexpertdev.com. LinkedIn for the professional history. GitHub for the open code. Read.cv for the timeline. The contact form on this site for actual project inquiries.
