I’m Syed Bilawal Bukhari, a freelance WordPress and Elementor developer. I earned my BSCS in Pakistan, chose freelancing over a conventional job, and now build websites with businesses and agencies across Europe, the US and Australia. This is how that happened, and what it taught me about building sites that last.
Choosing freelance WordPress after my BSCS
I studied Computer Science at the University of Central Punjab in Lahore from 2017 to 2021. The degree was heavy on fundamentals: C, C++, object-oriented programming, data structures and SQL. At the time, I did not expect that a course on data structures would shape how I set up WooCommerce catalogues years later. It did.
My WordPress work started before I graduated. A university professor hired me for WordPress projects, and I began building client websites with Divi while teaching myself more HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the side. In November 2020, while still studying, I opened my Fiverr and Upwork profiles.
By the time I finished my degree, I had a choice to make: follow the usual path into a full-time software role, or lean fully into freelance WordPress development. I chose freelancing. What I enjoyed most was already clear: taking a business’s requirements and turning them into a website that actually works for them.
The real progress came when I narrowed my focus to WordPress, Elementor and WooCommerce, and worked on getting properly good at them instead of spreading myself across everything.
Working globally from UTC+5
Freelance work on Fiverr led to my first long-term international client, a digital agency in Manchester, UK. I worked with that team for several years, building client sites and the agency’s own website. Later, a long partnership with the ABD Brands team gave me deep, hands-on experience with Elementor on projects for businesses in Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, the US and Australia.
Most of those projects came through agencies, which taught me how agency work really runs: someone else owns the client relationship, the brief has to be followed closely, and the developer’s job is to make the agency look good on time.
The hardest part of working globally was not the code. It was the clock. I work on Pakistan Standard Time, UTC+5, and my clients rarely do. A few habits made the difference:
- Planning around real overlap. A 9am start in London lands in my early afternoon, and Swiss mornings are even closer. US East Coast mornings fall in my evening, so those calls go at the end of my day.
- Working asynchronously with Australia. My morning is mid-afternoon in Sydney, which leaves a short window for questions. Everything else happens through clear written updates that are waiting when they log on.
- Written summaries after every change. What I changed, what I need from the client and what comes next. Nobody should have to wait a day for a call to understand where their project stands.
- Never letting the time difference become an excuse. If a client is waiting on me while they sleep, the work should be done when they wake up.
The technical lesson: clean architecture beats bloated themes, even with AI
If I had to pick one lesson from these years, it would be this: the way a site is built matters more than how it looks on launch day.
Many of the sites I am asked to fix share the same problems. The build has drifted away from the original design, it breaks on a phone, and it takes several seconds to load. Very often the root cause is the same too: a multipurpose theme carrying demo layouts, sliders and bundled plugins for features nobody uses, with one fix layered on top of another.
Custom-built sites age differently. When I rebuilt my own site, I used a lightweight base theme and built every section myself with Elementor and hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Each page’s styles are scoped to that page, so a change on one page cannot quietly break another. The site loads only what it uses, and I can change any part of it without fear.
You might think AI makes this less important. In my experience it makes it more important. I use AI every day, including Claude connected directly to WordPress, and it is very good at producing code quickly. But AI working on top of a bloated theme just produces more code on top of a mess. On a clean, well-structured site, every change it makes is easy to read, easy to review and easy to undo.
Speed of writing code is no longer the bottleneck. Judgement is: knowing what to build, how to structure it, and when to say no to another plugin. That is where my Computer Science background and years of agency work earn their keep.
Where I am now
Today I work with businesses and agencies as a freelance WordPress developer, focused on Elementor builds, WooCommerce stores, speed optimisation and white-label development for agencies. I also teach web development, which keeps my own fundamentals sharp.
I am still learning every week, and I would not have it any other way. If you are building something on WordPress and want a developer who cares about how it is built, not just how it looks, tell me about your project.
