WordPress Development in Canada

About WordPress Development

WordPress runs ~43% of the web for a reason, it's the most flexible, well-supported CMS available. We build WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores that load fast, rank well, and stay maintainable past year five. From a 5-page brochure site to a 50,000-SKU WooCommerce catalog, every build follows the same engineering standards: clean code, proper caching, security hardening, and a CMS your content team actually wants to use.

What the engagement includes

• Custom WordPress theme development from scratch
• Custom Gutenberg blocks and block patterns
• WooCommerce store development and customization
• WordPress plugin development (private and public)
• Headless WordPress with Next.js or Astro front-end
• WordPress speed optimization (PageSpeed 90+)
• WordPress security hardening and malware cleanup
• Site migration (Wix, Squarespace, Webflow → WordPress)

Tax on downloads, anonymised orders and donation receipts: Canadian rules in a WordPress build

A Canadian store selling downloads through WooCommerce works out the GST or HST on each sale from an address, and the CRA is specific about which addresses count. Its memorandum on the place of supply of intangible personal property, revised in April 2026, says that where a supplier obtains only one home or business address of the recipient in Canada in the ordinary course of its business, the supply is made in the province of that address, provided the rights can be used there, and that where it obtains more than one, it uses the address most closely connected with the supply. Addresses that count include a billing address connected with the supply, and the memorandum says an email address or an IP address that does not represent a specific physical location is not relevant. That rule meets two WooCommerce habits head on. The first is the checkout trimmed for download-only orders, where a plugin or snippet removes the billing address fields to reduce friction and leaves the store holding exactly the two things the CRA says do not count, an email and an IP address. The second is geolocation. WooCommerce can set a visitor's default location from their IP address, which is reasonable for an estimated price on the product page, but the tax on the order has to come from the billing address once it is entered, and WooCommerce's setting for what tax is calculated on offers the shipping address, the billing address or the shop's base address, so a store that sells mostly downloads chooses it deliberately rather than leaving it on shipping. The result decides whether an order carries the HST of a participating province or GST alone. Software licensed to a business for use across several provinces is dealt with by other rules in the same memorandum, Quebec's QST is administered separately by Revenu Québec, and customers outside Canada raise different questions again. Which rules apply to your catalogue is for your accountant.

In Quebec, WooCommerce's privacy settings meet a legal test they were not written for. Section 23 of the private sector act requires a business to destroy personal information once the purposes it was collected for are achieved, or to anonymise it to use for serious and legitimate purposes, and information counts as anonymised only if it is at all times reasonably foreseeable that it irreversibly no longer identifies the person, directly or indirectly. The anonymisation regulation, in force since 30 May 2024, sets the method: purposes fixed before the process starts, supervision by a person qualified in the field, removal of direct identifiers, a re-identification risk analysis against individualisation, correlation and inference that shows residual risk is very low, periodic reassessment, and a register recording what was anonymised, why, how and when the analysis was completed. WooCommerce offers retention periods for inactive accounts and for pending, failed, cancelled and completed orders, and describes completed orders as anonymised so sales statistics survive. The routine behind its order erasure replaces names, addresses, phone numbers and email with placeholders, truncates the IP address and deletes the admin order notes, but its default field list covers core fields only and its list of extra metadata is empty, so a gift message, a delivery instruction or a custom checkout field added by another plugin stays as it was unless that plugin registers it through the eraser's filters. The note the customer typed at checkout is not on the default list either. The order number survives too, and the same number sits in the payment processor's records and in the customer's inbox, which is exactly the correlation the regulation asks about. So the retention periods are filled in from a written schedule, every plugin that adds checkout data is mapped against those filters before launch, and the register lives with your person in charge of protecting personal information. Whether an anonymised order meets the regulation is for that person and your own counsel.

A registered charity taking donations through WordPress is issuing official tax receipts from a web server, and the Canada Revenue Agency's rules are specific enough to dictate the form. A receipt for a cash gift has to carry a statement that it is an official receipt for income tax purposes, the charity's name and address as on file with the CRA, its registration number, a unique serial number, the place it was issued, the date or year the gift was received and the date the receipt was issued, the donor's full name including middle initial and their address, the amount, the amount and description of any advantage, the eligible amount, the signature of an authorised individual, and the CRA's name and website address. So the form carries a middle initial field, and a gala ticket sold through WooCommerce records the value of the dinner as an advantage so the eligible amount comes out right. For computer-generated receipts the CRA expects the data to be protected from alteration and unauthorised access, emailed receipts to be read-only, and copies of every emailed receipt to be kept. Serial numbers need care on WordPress, because a staging copy of the site can start issuing numbers of its own, so numbering runs from one sequence on production, receipting is switched off in every other environment, and cancelled or reissued receipts are kept for two years after the end of the calendar year in which they were cancelled or reissued. Fundraising emails from a registered charity are excluded from section 6 of CASL where their primary purpose is raising funds, which a newsletter that mainly sells event tickets may not meet. How your receipts and records are kept is for your accountant.

How we work with Canadian clients

Two things shape Canadian projects more than anything technical. The first is language: if you serve Quebec, French is a legal requirement rather than a nice addition, and the rules tightened considerably under Bill 96. The French version has to be available on equal terms with the English one, which is a design constraint from the first wireframe rather than a translation task at the end.

The second is anti-spam law. CASL is stricter than most teams expect, and the penalties are real. Consent has to be express or clearly implied, records of it have to be kept, and every commercial message needs a working unsubscribe and accurate sender identification. We build those into the product rather than leaving them to whoever configures the mailing tool later, because that is where the exposure usually sits.

Indicative pricing in CAD

Converted from our published Indian rates and rounded. Exchange rates move, so the figure on your quote is calculated on the day it is issued.

Questions Canadian clients ask

WordPress Development: common questions

Other markets we work in