A senior-living wellness platform on WordPress, seven years running

A healthy-aging program for senior-living communities needed a platform used by three very different groups: residents taking a wellness assessment, coordinators tracking their community, and corporate admins overseeing many communities. The first vendor's build could not be updated safely, and the audience skewed older, so the interface had to be forgiving.

I produced the information architecture, user flows and wireframes, then hand-coded the rebuilt platform (2020 to 2021, before AI coding tools) to the design team's Adobe XD mocks. It launched in January 2021 after staging, data migration and acceptance testing by the client's operations staff.

• A scored assessment of 45 statements across five wellbeing components and three score bands, one question per page, with dark-mode and large-font options. The client supplied the scoring spec; I implemented it.
• A personalised content recommendation engine driven by the assessment: each answer maps to a beginner, intermediate or advanced level, filtering articles, videos and podcasts through custom taxonomies, with per-member settings. It is rule-based, not machine learning.
• Reporting: a plugin with a nightly WP-Cron cache so reports never scan every entry at render time, plus an assessment and PDF module with age and gender norms, per-resident and community reports with charts, and a WP-CLI migration of historical records.
• Signed-token single sign-on over the REST API so residents can open the platform inside a partner's iOS app, later replacing cookies to fix Safari tracking prevention.
• Account tooling: duplicate-account merge, a Manage Users overhaul, a corporate community switcher and CSV bulk import.
• Security and hosting: led a WordPress incident response (a backdoored plugin removed, a hijacked account contained, an SQL-injection pattern and plaintext-password logging closed, core upgraded from 5.8 to 7.1), added Playwright smoke and security-regression tests, and moved the platform between hosts twice.

The client has stayed for seven years and the platform is still in active use and development. I have no user-count or engagement figures to quote, so I do not.