I Rewrote My Freelance Profile and Realised I’d Been Selling the Wrong Thing

Twelve years of WordPress work, described in words that could have belonged to anyone. Here’s what was actually wrong with it.

My freelance profile heading read: “Optimizing WordPress Websites for Speed, UX, and Conversions.”

Underneath it, the description opened with twelve-plus years of experience in WordPress, WooCommerce and PHP development, promised fast, secure, high-converting websites, and then listed speed, UX, SEO, conversion optimization, mobile usability, Core Web Vitals and technical bug fixing. It closed by saying I deliver clear, actionable solutions that make your website faster, smoother and more effective.

Every word of that is true. I sat with it recently and realised that’s the problem: it’s true and it’s worthless.

Table of Contents

The test I failed

Here’s a test worth running on your own profile. Cover your name, hand the text to someone, and ask them to guess who wrote it. If a hundred other developers could plausibly have written the same paragraph, you haven’t described yourself. You’ve described a category.

Mine failed instantly. “Fast, secure, high-converting websites” is not a claim, it’s the floor. Nobody advertises slow, insecure websites that repel customers. When you promise the absence of failure, you’re competing on nothing, which in practice means competing on price.

The second failure was subtler and I think more common among developers. I opened by calling myself a specialist and then immediately listed eight specialities. Speed, UX, SEO, conversions, mobile, Core Web Vitals, debugging, security. I meant it as range. It reads as a keyword dump, and the effect on a buyer is precisely the opposite of what I intended: someone who does everything sounds like someone who has committed to nothing.

The third failure was that there was no verifiable statement anywhere in it. “Faster, smoother, more effective” cannot be checked, argued with, or disproved. It’s the copywriting equivalent of a function that returns true.

What I found by accident

The strange part came when I scrolled down my own profile. My work-experience entry, which I’d written quickly and never optimized, was far better writing than the headline copy I’d fussed over.

It talked about solving plugin conflicts and WooCommerce checkout problems. It said I work with businesses that depend on WordPress to operate. It ended with a line about focusing on long-term stability rather than quick fixes.

That section was better because I wasn’t marketing when I wrote it. I was just describing the work. The moment I switched into marketing mode, I reached for the generic vocabulary everyone reaches for, and buried the actual substance underneath it.

Capabilities versus problems

Developers describe capabilities. Clients buy resolved problems. That gap is the whole issue.

“I optimize WordPress websites for speed” is a capability. “Your checkout takes six seconds and people are abandoning it” is a problem. They point at the same skill, but only one of them sounds like it was written by someone who understands the client’s Tuesday afternoon.

This runs against an instinct most of us have, which is to keep the description broad so we don’t turn work away. It feels safer. It isn’t. A narrow claim is what makes someone stop scrolling, and a person who arrives because you specifically named their problem is a far better conversation than five people who arrived because you might do anything.

So the new heading became: WordPress and WooCommerce Speed Expert, 12 Years Fixing Slow Sites.

WooCommerce is in there deliberately. It’s a smaller pond than WordPress and it’s where my actual depth is, so competing there makes more sense than competing against every WordPress generalist on the internet. “Fixing slow sites” replaced “optimizing websites” because clients don’t wake up wanting optimization. They wake up because something is slow.

A small technical aside

The first version of the heading used a pipe character to separate the two halves. The field rejected it with a special-characters error, along with the ampersand and the plus sign in “12+”. Worth knowing before you spend an afternoon crafting something that won’t save: write “and” rather than “&”, use a comma rather than a pipe, and if you’re pasting from a document, run it through a plain-text editor first so you don’t smuggle in a smart quote or an em dash.

The rewritten description

The new version opens with three questions instead of a credential. A slow site, a broken checkout, a plugin conflict nobody can trace. Then the credential, because at that point it’s answering a question the reader is already asking. Then a concrete performance claim with real numbers. Then the specific list of work: speed and Core Web Vitals, WooCommerce and checkout fixes, PHP and legacy debugging, Elementor issues, plugin conflicts, caching and server tuning, security hardening.

Same list of skills as before, roughly. The difference is that it now arrives after a problem the reader recognises, which turns it from a keyword dump into an answer.

And it ends by asking for something: send me your site’s address and I’ll tell you what’s slowing it down. My old description ended by describing itself. Free diagnosis costs me fifteen minutes and starts a real conversation, which is worth considerably more than a closing sentence about delivering value.

What I haven’t finished

I’m not going to pretend this is a success story yet, because I changed the copy days ago and have no results to report.

Two things are still missing. The first is proof. My new description contains a specific performance claim and I want a documented before-and-after behind it rather than a number I believe to be typical. That means actually recording results on the next few projects. The second is an intro video, which I’ve been avoiding for the obvious reason that nobody enjoys watching themselves on camera. I did consider generating one, and then decided against it: the entire function of that video is to prove a real, competent person is behind the profile, and outsourcing that to a synthetic presenter defeats the point.

If you want to try this

Read your own profile out loud, then ask which sentences a competitor couldn’t have written. In my case, almost none of them, and I’d been sitting on that copy for a long time without noticing.

Then look for the place where you’ve described your work honestly and unselfconsciously, because it’s usually somewhere on the page already. In an old project description, a message to a client, a README. That’s your voice, and it’s better than the one you use when you know you’re being read.