MasterTop — Marketplace for Home Repair Specialists

The challenge

There was no proper local platform for finding home-repair specialists in Tyumen. Avito-style classifieds offer no verification and no SEO landing pages per category. Federal platforms charge high commissions and hide the client’s contact info from the specialist. The goal: build a regional platform where SEO traffic from Yandex queries like “electrician Tyumen” lands on a dedicated category page, and where both the specialist and the client get proper dashboards with requests, responses, and reviews.

The solution

WordPress remains as the core (proven admin for content — articles, pages, categories). Everything else is built from scratch: a custom theme with Customizer, custom plugins for the business logic.

What was built:

• Custom theme matching the brand: home page with category search, dedicated pages for 20+ work types, specialist profile pages, request pages. All elements exposed via Customizer — the owner edits texts, images, and blocks without touching code.
• Two account types — specialist and client. Standard WP registration is disabled; a custom form handles validation and phone verification.
• Specialist dashboard — portfolio, category specialization, price list, incoming-request feed filtered by district and category, one-click apply.
• Client dashboard — create a request (“what to fix”), invite specific specialists, request history, ratings and reviews.
• PWA build — manifest.webmanifest + service worker. The site installs on iOS / Android as a full-fledged app, no app-store publishing.
• Regional SEO — every work category has its own landing page tuned for commercial queries like “{service} Tyumen”. Headings, meta tags, FAQ blocks, cross-linking with related categories.

AI assistant: a complete request, no headache

Built in for both sides — client and specialist. Clients usually struggle to describe a job: what’s broken, what surface area, what materials, what timeline. The assistant runs a sequence of clarifying questions and composes a detailed request on the user’s behalf — specialists see the full scope upfront and ask fewer follow-ups, lifting reply-conversion.

On the specialist side, the assistant works in reverse: asks about specialization, district, availability, price band, and surfaces matching open requests. No need to scroll the feed and filter by hand.

Security

The site is hardened with defense-in-depth — several independent layers. If an attacker breaches one, the next one stops them. The same stack used on payment-accepting stores:

• up-to-date WordPress, PHP 8.2, plugins — with core security auto-updates
• hardening constants in wp-config.php (DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT, FORCE_SSL_ADMIN, WP_DEBUG=false)
• Wordfence WAF + Limit Login Attempts (two-tier brute-force protection)
• hidden admin URL (standard /wp-login.php returns 404)
• unique admin login instead of admin
• XML-RPC blocked at two independent levels (Nginx + must-use plugin)
• info leaks removed (readme.html, wp-config-sample.php)
• file permissions: wp-config.php — 600

The outcome

The platform is launched and populated. 20+ work categories are live, alongside specialist profiles and the blog. The site installs as a PWA on iOS and Android.

This is my own project, so the architectural decisions (custom dashboard, custom XML-RPC block, custom request tables) didn’t have to defer to a legacy site — the build was scoped from day one for traffic and SEO. That gives room to scale beyond Tyumen.

Tech stack

• CMS: WordPress 6.9 (core only) + fully custom theme and plugins
• Backend: PHP 8.2, MySQL, must-use plugins with bespoke business logic
• Frontend: Vanilla JS + CSS, no frameworks (minimal JS payload — critical on mobile)
• PWA: manifest + service worker, home-screen install
• Security: Wordfence WAF, Limit Login Attempts, hidden admin URL, XML-RPC disabled
• Analytics: Yandex.Metrika (goals on specialist signup and request creation)