Lozucars

Lozucars is a physical used-car dealership in Atios (Vigo–Porriño), Pontevedra. Local search is dominated by huge marketplaces — Coches.net, Wallapop, Milanuncios — and a small dealer can't outspend them. The brief: an owned, fast, trustworthy website that captures local 'second-hand car' searches, doesn't lean on a generic template or page builder, and lets the owner manage stock without knowing WordPress.

Instead of starting from a commercial theme, I built a 100% custom WordPress theme from scratch — no page builder, no SEO plugins — on top of a hand-made design system (design tokens, a variable brand typeface, an editorial layout). The data model (cars, specs, taxonomies) lives in a standalone mu-plugin, decoupled from the theme on purpose, so the catalogue survives any redesign. Technical SEO and structured data are written by hand, and assets load conditionally for Core Web Vitals.

1. 01Bespoke WordPress theme coded from scratch (no page builder, no SEO plugins) with a token-based design system and a variable brand font
2. 02Standalone data model in a mu-plugin: "vehiculo" custom post type + brand/fuel/body taxonomies with clean, semantic URLs (/coches/marca/…)
3. 03ACF-driven car specs and a custom drag-and-drop photo gallery, rendered as a swipeable slider on the listing page
4. 04Client-side catalogue with instant filtering and sorting (brand, fuel, gearbox, price & mileage ranges) — no page reloads, deep-linkable from the homepage
5. 05Hand-coded technical SEO with zero plugins: dynamic titles & meta, canonical, robots, Open Graph and full JSON-LD (AutoDealer/LocalBusiness, Car, Offer, Breadcrumb)
6. 06Geo-targeted on-page signals and local structured data (Atios · Vigo–Porriño) to compete for local car searches
7. 07Core Web Vitals work: conditional CSS/JS loading, font preload, cache-busting, emoji & unused-script removal
8. 08Custom "car manager" WordPress role so the client publishes and edits stock safely, with no access to the rest of the site

A small dealer with a fast, fully indexable, structured-data-rich site that competes for local searches on its own terms — no third-party marketplaces, no plugin bloat, no template lock-in. The owner manages the entire inventory autonomously and safely. A practical case study in shipping a hand-built WordPress theme — not a template — with technical SEO written from the ground up.