lower conversion for every additional 100 milliseconds of load time
Shopify, 2026 analysisWORDPRESS | SHOPIFY | CUSTOM BUILDS | CORE WEB VITALS | SCHEMA
Most websites are designed first and optimised later, which means an SEO team spends the next year undoing decisions made in week two. We build the other way round: structure, speed and search foundations first, design on top of them. It costs the same and saves you the rebuild.
Website development services for businesses that need a site to perform, not just look right. We build on WordPress, Shopify or custom depending on what the business needs, with speed, Core Web Vitals, crawlable structure and schema handled during the build rather than retrofitted. Existing sites can often be fixed rather than replaced.
Published performance research, sources named. These are the numbers that decide whether a site earns anything.
lower conversion for every additional 100 milliseconds of load time
Shopify, 2026 analysislower conversion on pages taking longer than four seconds
Yottaa Web Performance Index, 2025bounce rate on pages over four seconds, 17 points higher than faster pages
Yottaa, 2025of websites pass Core Web Vitals, across 18.4 million origins
Google Chrome UX Report, May 2026of mobile sites meet good Core Web Vitals, against 56% on desktop
Web Almanac, 2025the Largest Contentful Paint threshold Google counts as good
GoogleThe first number is the one to sit with. Every tenth of a second costs roughly three and a half percent of conversions. A site that loads in five seconds instead of two is not slightly worse than a fast one, it is losing a large share of the people who arrive.
Half of all sites fail Core Web Vitals, and mobile fails more than desktop, which is the wrong way round given where the traffic is. This is not a niche technical concern any more, it is the single most common reason a site underperforms both in rankings and in conversion at the same time.
The reason it keeps happening is that speed is treated as something to check after launch. By then the theme is chosen, the page builder is installed, the plugins are in and the images are full resolution, and fixing it properly means going back to decisions made months earlier. Building for it from the start costs nothing extra.
Sources: Shopify website load time analysis (2026); Yottaa Web Performance Index (2025); Google Chrome UX Report (May 2026); HTTP Archive Web Almanac (2025).
The usual sequence is that a business commissions a website from a designer or a general agency, launches it, and then hires somebody to do SEO. The SEO team opens it and finds a page builder generating bloated markup, a URL structure that does not match how anyone searches, no schema, unoptimised images, and a blog sitting on a subdomain.
None of that is fixable in a monthly retainer. It gets worked around, badly, and the client pays twice: once for a site that was never going to perform, and again for the years of compensating for it.
Building with search in mind from the start does not mean an ugly website. It means the structure is decided by how people search rather than by a template, images are handled properly, the markup is clean, schema is in from launch, and the URL hierarchy makes sense. Those are decisions, not costs.
It also means the site is built to be worked on. A lot of what slows down later SEO work is simply that nobody can change anything without breaking the layout.
Six problems we find in almost every site review.
Usually a stack of causes rather than one: a heavy theme, a page builder producing bloated markup, twenty plugins, uncompressed images and cheap shared hosting. Each is survivable and together they are fatal, particularly given that every hundred milliseconds costs roughly three and a half percent of conversions.
What we do: Measure what is actually causing it rather than guessing, then fix in order of impact. Images and scripts usually account for most of it and can be fixed without a rebuild.
The most expensive and most preventable mistake in this list. URLs changed without redirects, pages consolidated without mapping, content removed because it looked dated. The rankings that took years to build went with them.
What we do: Audit what was lost, map the old URLs to the new ones, implement the redirects that should have been there, and recover what can still be recovered. Some of it usually can.
A build that was handed over without documentation or training, or one where the layout is so fragile that changing a paragraph shifts the whole page. The business stops updating the site, which slowly kills it.
What we do: Rebuild the editing experience so your team can actually use it, or document and train properly on what exists. A site nobody can update is a site that stops earning.
Depressingly common. Hosting in the developer's name, domain registered to them, no admin access, no code repository. The business does not own the thing it paid for.
What we do: Recover what can be recovered, move everything into accounts in your name, and document it. Going forward, every account is created under your email so this cannot happen again.
Design and conversion are different jobs. A visually impressive site with no clear next step, a contact form buried three clicks down, or a phone number that is not tappable on mobile will look fine and perform badly.
What we do: Work through the actual path a visitor takes and remove what is stopping them, which is usually clarity rather than aesthetics.
Often you do not. A lot of sites we are asked to replace are structurally fine and simply slow, badly organised or missing the technical foundations, all of which are cheaper to fix than to rebuild.
What we do: Review it honestly and tell you which it is. We will say if the site can be fixed, even though the rebuild would be worth more to us.
Site architecture and URL hierarchy decided by how your customers search and how pages should pass authority to each other, agreed before design starts rather than inherited from a template.
WordPress, Shopify or custom depending on what the business actually needs, built responsive and tested on real devices rather than in a browser window resized to look like a phone.
Image compression and modern formats, script and stylesheet control, caching, lazy loading and hosting advice, with Largest Contentful Paint targeted under two and a half seconds on mobile.
Crawlable structure, clean markup, XML sitemaps, robots configuration, canonical handling, and Organization and LocalBusiness schema implemented at build rather than added later.
Where an existing site is being replaced, a full URL map and redirect plan so you keep the rankings and links you already earned. This is where most redesigns lose their traffic.
Documentation, training so your team can edit content without breaking layouts, plus updates, backups, security and uptime monitoring if you want us to keep looking after it.
A well built site is the foundation everything else stands on. Our SEO services assume it exists, and where it does not, this is usually the first work we recommend.
A lot of the work that makes a site legible to AI systems is ordinary development work done properly. Clean semantic markup, content that is present in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript after load, structured data that states what the business is, and a URL hierarchy that makes the relationship between pages obvious.
The failure we see most often is content rendered entirely client side. It looks fine in a browser and is partially or completely invisible to crawlers and to the systems that build AI answers. On JavaScript heavy builds this is worth checking specifically rather than assuming.
Schema matters more than it used to. Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, FAQ and Article markup are how a machine confirms what it is looking at instead of inferring it, and inference is where competitors get named instead of you.
We implement all of this at build. Retrofitting it into an existing site is possible and always more expensive than having done it the first time. The full explanation of how AI visibility is measured is on our SEO services page.
The right platform depends on what the site has to do, not on what we prefer.
Flexible and familiar, and where most of the speed problems we fix originate. Built lean, without the plugin stack that usually comes with it.
Fast by default with real constraints around URL structure and filtering, which need designing around from the start.
More control than Shopify and more ways to end up slow. Worth it when the flexibility is genuinely needed.
Single purpose pages for campaigns, built to load instantly and convert rather than to impress.
Where an off the shelf platform genuinely does not fit, which is less often than people assume.
Taking over a site somebody else built and either fixing it or replacing it properly, with the redirects handled correctly.
The site is the foundation. Every other service we run either points traffic at it or tries to improve how it performs, and both are limited by how it was built.
Our SEO services work far better on a site with clean structure and good speed, and considerably slower on one where every change requires working around the build.
For a business with a physical location, local SEO depends on the site carrying correct address details, schema and fast mobile pages, because most of that traffic arrives on a phone.
For online stores, ecommerce SEO is constrained directly by platform choices made at build time, particularly around URL structure and filtering. And for anyone running PPC management, landing page speed and clarity decide what the ad spend actually returns.
Requirements, site architecture, URL structure and keyword mapping agreed before any design work begins, plus a redirect plan if an existing site is being replaced.
Pages designed and built against the agreed structure, tested on real devices, with speed measured as we go rather than at the end.
Schema, sitemaps, analytics and Search Console set up, redirects tested, Core Web Vitals verified, then launch with monitoring for the first week.
Documentation and training, then updates, backups, security and monitoring if you want us to maintain it. Rankings watched closely for the first month after any migration.
Shopify if you are selling products and want the platform to handle payments, inventory and hosting, accepting some limits on URL structure and filtering. WordPress for content led business sites where you need flexibility and will actually use it. WooCommerce when you need Shopify's job done with more control and are willing to manage hosting properly.
Custom only when an off the shelf platform genuinely cannot do the job, which is rarer than developers like to admit. If somebody recommends custom for a standard business website, ask what specifically requires it.
It can, badly, and this is the single most common way businesses lose traffic. Changing URLs without redirects, removing pages that were ranking, or restructuring content without mapping it will cost you rankings that took years to earn.
Done properly it does not. That means a full crawl of the existing site first, a URL map from old to new, redirects tested before launch rather than after, and close monitoring for the first month. It is not difficult, it is just frequently skipped.
Usually fixed. Most slow sites are slow for reasons that do not require a rebuild: oversized images, too many plugins, render blocking scripts, no caching, and hosting that cannot cope. Addressing those often takes a site from failing Core Web Vitals to passing.
A rebuild is genuinely warranted when the theme or page builder itself produces the bloat, when the structure is wrong at a level no amount of optimisation fixes, or when the site cannot be edited safely. We will tell you which applies after looking at it.
A straightforward business site of ten to twenty pages is typically five to seven weeks from agreed brief to launch. A store or a larger site with custom functionality is longer, and a migration from an existing site adds time for the redirect work.
The part that usually causes delay is content. If the text, photos and product information are ready, builds run to schedule. If they are not, everything waits, which is worth knowing before you commit to a launch date.
You do, all of it. Hosting, domain, analytics, Search Console and any third party services are set up under your own email and remain yours. We take access rather than ownership.
This matters more than it sounds. A large share of the rescue work we do is for businesses whose previous developer held the hosting and domain and then became uncontactable. Insist on this with any developer, not just us.
You can, and we set it up so that is realistic: documentation, training, and an editing experience your team can use without breaking layouts. Content updates should not require a developer.
For updates, backups, security patching and uptime monitoring, we offer ongoing maintenance if you want it. It is optional and priced separately, and we will not build a site that only works if you keep paying us to look after it.
Almost certainly not. Separate mobile sites are largely obsolete and create duplicate content problems. A responsive site built properly serves every device from one codebase and is what Google expects.
An app is a different question and rarely the right answer for a business website. Apps make sense when you need repeat usage, offline capability or device features. If the goal is to be found and contacted, that is a website job.
It depends on the number of pages, whether it is a straightforward business site or a store, how much custom functionality is needed, and whether content is ready. A simple brochure site and a store with a thousand products are not comparable jobs.
We scope it after understanding what the site has to do, and we will tell you where you can spend less. If a business needs a fast, well structured six page site rather than the twenty page one they asked about, that is what we will quote.
We will test your speed under real mobile conditions, check the technical foundations, and tell you honestly which it is. If the site can be fixed, we will say so. You get the findings whether or not you work with us.
Get a Free Site ReviewI’m extremely satisfied! highlighting key areas for improvement like speed, keywords, and mobile optimization. After implementing the suggestions, my rankings and traffic improved.
