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corePHP
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A studio since 2000

People helping people.

We're ‘corePHP’ — a studio of thirty‑some developers, marketers, designers and operators who build, run and grow internet businesses on Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify. Same team end-to-end. Real humans on the phone.

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corePHP Studio brief · rev. 2026.04

A studio of thirty‑some humans, helping clients ship.

Origin

Founded 2000 in Battle Creek, Michigan by twin brothers Steven & Michael Pignataro. Brief: do good work, answer the phone, and treat clients as long-term partners.

Method

We learn your business first — then we recommend the stack. Same team builds it and grows it. Boring is reliable, reliable is fast, fast scales.

Stack

PHP · Laravel · Symfony · WordPress · WooCommerce · Shopify · Joomla. Headless, classic, hybrid. Plus SEO, paid media, email, lead-gen.

Team

~30 humans. Three continents. First-name terms. The twins are still part of the day-to-day. So is everyone else here.

15,000+Sites shipped
1,000+Hosted in-house
800+Under maintenance
25,000+Conversions / mo
Steven & Michael Pignataro Co-founders · corePHP
Est. 2000Battle Creek, MI
What we do

Four practices, one team running them.

We don't sell a service menu. We learn your business, pick what moves the needle, and run it. The same engineers that build the site run the SEO. The same team running ads also knows your codebase.

Build.

  • Laravel
  • Symfony
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • Shopify
  • Joomla
  • Headless APIs

Custom development that bends to your business. The thing you sketched on a napkin and the thing your CFO needs to sleep at night.

Recently shipped
  • → Custom Laravel platform 1.2M users / day
  • → Headless WooCommerce migration +38% conversion
  • → Symfony API gateway 7-figure throughput
  • → Multi-tenant SaaS rebuild 3-month timeline
See selected work

Market.

  • SEO
  • Paid Ads
  • Email
  • Social
  • Lead Gen
  • CRO

Growth that compounds, run by the people who built the site.

Run.

  • Hosting
  • Security
  • Monitoring
  • Maintenance
  • PCI

Hosting, security, monitoring — and a human at the other end of the phone.

New · 2026

byCORE.

Our in‑house SaaS lineup. The operating tools we built to run our own studio at scale — site monitoring, analytics, workflow — now packaged for any team running serious internet operations.

See the byCORE lineup

Five SaaS tools, built in our own studio.

We built these to run ‘corePHP’. We use them every day. They're the difference between guessing and knowing — between firefighting and shipping. Now they're available to any team that wants the same advantage.

coreleads.guru
Sarah Klein · Demo request 92 · HOT
Marcus Liu · Pricing form 87 · HOT
Jen Park · Content download 64 · WARM
Alex Reyes · Phone callback 78 · WARM
01

coreLeads

Lead capture & nurture

Capture, score and route every lead from every channel — ad clicks, forms, phone calls, even the ones your sales team forgets to log.

  • Universal capture · web, voice, paid
  • Auto‑scored against your ICP
  • Routes to the right rep, every time
Explore coreLeads
corecrm.guru
New · 12
Qualified · 8
Proposal · 4
Won · 21
Pipeline value $842,500
02

coreCRM

Relationship management

A CRM built for digital agencies and operators. Pipelines, deal stages, activity timelines, and a contact view that actually shows the whole story.

  • Drag‑and‑drop pipeline kanban
  • Two‑way sync · Gmail / Outlook / Slack
  • Activity timeline + meeting notes built in
Explore coreCRM
coreads.guru
Spend $48.2k ↑ 6%
ROAS 4.7x ↑ 0.6x
CPA $31 ↓ 14%
03

coreAds

Paid media console

Run Google, Meta and LinkedIn from one console. Auto‑budget alerts, creative performance, and the kind of cross‑channel view native ad managers refuse to give you.

  • Unified spend / ROAS / CPA across networks
  • Creative library with performance scoring
  • Auto‑pause underperformers, with rules
Explore coreAds
coreseo.guru
1 php development agency ↑ 3
3 laravel custom builds ↑ 2
5 woocommerce migration ↑ 8
7 symfony enterprise dev − 0
04

coreSEO

SEO command center

Keyword tracking, technical audits, content gap analysis, competitor watch — stitched into one weekly digest that even non‑SEO operators can read.

  • Daily SERP tracking · 10k keywords
  • Technical audits with prioritized fixes
  • Content gap finder + brief generator
Explore coreSEO
corereporting.guru
MRR $284k ↑ 9.2%
Sessions 128k ↑ 12%
Conv. 3.81% ↑ 0.4pt
05

coreReporting

Cross‑channel reporting

Marketing, code health, and revenue metrics in one dashboard. White‑label client reports auto‑built and sent on schedule.

  • 50+ data sources connected out of the box
  • Scheduled white‑label PDF + email reports
  • Custom widgets for any KPI you care about
Explore coreReporting
The People

Four humans who answer the phone.

Steven and Michael Pignataro founded the company in 2000. Josh and Ashley run the day to day. You’ll meet at least one of them on the first call — on first‑name terms, with the calendar of someone who actually owns the work.

  1. Steven Pignataro
    Co-founder · CTO

    Steven Pignataro

    Picks the stack. Reviews the architecture. Still gets into the code on a Friday.

  2. Michael Pignataro
    Co-founder · CEO

    Michael Pignataro

    Runs the business. Leads sales and marketing. Answers most first calls himself.

  3. Josh Thomas
    Marketing

    Josh Thomas

    SEO meets paid meets lifecycle — the unglamorous stuff that compounds.

  4. Ashley Williams
    Client Services

    Ashley Williams

    Owns client outcomes. Translates between engineering, marketing, and you.

§ 05 — Selected Work

Four real projects.
Public URLs, public receipts.

No mood boards. No moodier mockups. These are the live sites we shipped, with the URLs in plain sight. Click any of them and see the work in production.

I.  Twenty‑twenty‑five DTC · WooCommerce

Crowlers & More

Bulk aluminum cans, ordered by breweries. A WooCommerce store that handles wholesale, retail and personalization without manual stitching.

An ecommerce platform built around the order, not the catalog.

Visit the site crowlersandmore.com
Crowlers & More homepage
II.  Twenty‑twenty‑four Custom Laravel · SaaS

dspworkplace

The entire operating system for an Amazon DSP business. Routes, drivers, payroll, compliance — one interface, owned by the operator.

A custom build that runs the business.

Visit the site dspworkplace.com
dspworkplace operations platform
III.  Twenty‑twenty‑four WordPress · SEO program

Lake Area Mortgage

From page four to the local pack. A WordPress rebuild and a year of patient SEO that finally made the phone ring.

A rebuild, then a year of SEO.

Visit the site lakeareamortgage.com
Lake Area Mortgage homepage
IV.  Twenty‑twenty‑three Product · SaaS

BirdSeed

Twelve conversion tools, one install. We took over the build and finished a SaaS product the agency stack kept asking for.

A product line, not just a project.

Visit the site birdseed.io
BirdSeed conversion platform
See yourself in the work?

Let’s build the next one together.

Twenty‑six years of receipts. The next project starts with a fifteen‑minute call. No deck. Just questions.

Book a 15-min call See more work
§ 06 — Field Notes

From the workbench.

February 2026

We built byCORE Sentinel because every monitor we tried lied to us.

For fifteen years we paid someone to tell us whether our clients' sites were up. Every one of them, eventually, missed the outage that mattered. So we wrote our own. The brief was small: never miss a real failure, never wake anyone up for a false one. We've been running it on our own stack for a year before putting it on the byCORE shelf.

Steven Pignataro · 5 min read

February 2026

When the website is the operations system.

The last three custom Laravel platforms we shipped don't really have a marketing job. They schedule trucks. They route technicians. They run a business. A short writeup on what changes when the site stops being a brochure and starts being the work.

Michael Pignataro · 9 min read

§ 07 — Get in touch

Tell us about the project.

We'll send a real human reply within one business day. Worst case, you get free advice. Best case, we build something great together.

We never share your details. We answer.