Web development services that are still fast a year after handover
Almost every agency hands over a site scoring in the nineties. Rather fewer hand over one still scoring in the nineties twelve months later. The difference is not talent, it is whether anything in the build pipeline stops a regression shipping.
Fast, accessible builds with a performance budget enforced in the pipeline, so speed survives contact with your marketing team.
What are web development services?
Web development services cover designing and building the site itself: architecture and templates, front end code, content management so your team can publish without a developer, integrations to the systems you already run, accessibility to current standards, and the performance engineering that keeps Core Web Vitals inside the thresholds after launch rather than only on the day of it.
Every project here is one of two things. A new build, or an existing site that has stopped serving the business it was made for.
Both come down to the same question: what does this site have to do, and what is currently stopping it.
Why sites get slower after launch
This is the most predictable failure in the industry and almost nobody quotes for preventing it.
Nothing stops a regression shipping. A site launches fast because somebody optimised it once. Then a tag manager arrives, a chat widget, three tracking pixels, a video embed and a hero image nobody compressed. Each is individually reasonable. Nothing in the process measures the cumulative effect, so nothing objects.
A performance budget is what makes speed stick. Set a ceiling on page weight and blocking scripts, enforce it in the build pipeline, and a change that breaks it fails before it reaches production. This is standard practice in product engineering and rare in agency web builds.
Core Web Vitals are treated as ranking factors, not suggestions. Failing them limits what your content can achieve before it competes on merit. That makes performance an SEO deliverable rather than a nice to have, and it makes the launch score the least interesting number in the project.
Accessibility enforcement has tightened. Requirements have hardened across the EU, the US and other major markets, and the technical standard is WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Building to it from the start costs very little. Retrofitting it costs several times more and is nobody’s favourite project.
The underlying point is that a website is not a deliverable you receive once. It is a thing that decays unless something in the process actively resists it, and choosing that something is a decision made at build time.
What our web development services cover
Built so your team can run the site afterwards without booking developer time for every change.
Architecture and templates
Page types, components and content models designed before anything is styled, so the site can grow without every new page becoming a bespoke build.
Front end build
Semantic, accessible markup with the JavaScript kept proportionate to what the page actually does. Most slow sites are slow because of what was optional.
Performance budget
A ceiling on weight and blocking resources, enforced in the pipeline. This is the single item that determines where your score is in a year.
Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA
Contrast, keyboard operation, focus states, form labels and screen reader support built in during development rather than audited in afterwards.
Content management
Editable sections and blocks so marketing can build and change pages independently. A site only your developer can update is a bottleneck with a design.
Integrations
CRM, ERP, booking, payments and analytics connected properly, with failures that surface rather than silently stopping.
SEO foundations
Crawlable structure, clean URLs, structured data and headings that reflect the page rather than the design. Cheap at build time, expensive later.
Security and hardening
Sensible defaults, dependency hygiene and an update path, because a site that cannot be safely updated will eventually not be updated.
Measurement from day one
Analytics and field performance data configured at launch, so the first month is a baseline rather than a gap in the record.
You can check where your current site stands with our bulk PageSpeed checker. Test several page types rather than the home page alone, because the home page is usually the one somebody remembered to optimise.
The individual parts of web development
Most clients want a whole site. Some arrive with one specific piece of work, so each of these is available on its own.
Custom web development
Bespoke builds where an off the shelf theme or template genuinely will not do the job, rather than because bespoke sounds better.
See custom development →WordPress development
Themes, blocks and plugins built so updates do not overwrite your work and your team can publish without a developer.
See WordPress development →Web application development
Portals, dashboards, calculators and tools where the thing being built is software rather than a website with software attached.
See app development →Landing page development
Campaign pages built to load fast and convert, with design and optimisation handled as their own disciplines beneath this.
See landing pages →Website redesign
Rebuilding an existing site without discarding the rankings, URLs and content that are currently working for you.
See redesign →Website maintenance
Updates, backups, security patching and monitoring, which is where the performance budget you paid for either holds or quietly stops mattering.
See maintenance →Shopify development
Theme work, custom sections and the checkout extensibility migration for merchants on Shopify.
See Shopify development →WooCommerce development
Stores built on WordPress, where you own the server, the database and every decision about what runs on them.
See WooCommerce development →How a build runs
Decide what the site has to do
Which pages carry the business, what the current one gets wrong, and what your team needs to be able to change without us. Design decisions follow from this rather than preceding it.
Set the budget before writing code
Performance ceiling, accessibility target and browser support agreed up front. Constraints set at the start are cheap. The same constraints introduced at the end are a rebuild.
Build in components, review in the browser
Templates and blocks rather than pages, reviewed on real devices instead of in a static mockup, because a design signed off on a monitor is not a design anybody has actually used.
Launch, then hand over properly
Redirects mapped, analytics live, your team trained on the parts they own, and the performance budget still running in the pipeline after we leave.
Sites we designed and built
Numbers taken from Google Search Console on sites we built from nothing, and readable in full.
When you do not need a new website
A rebuild is the most enjoyable thing to commission and one of the easiest to commission for the wrong reason.
When the problem is traffic. A new site converts the visitors you already have slightly better. If not enough people arrive, the same budget spent on ranking or advertising will do considerably more, and we would rather say that than take the build.
When the current site works and simply looks dated. Design fatigue is real and it is usually felt internally rather than by customers, who see the site far less often than you do. A targeted refresh of the pages that matter is often the better trade.
When nobody will own it afterwards. A site with no owner for updates and content becomes the same problem again in three years. If that is the situation, the maintenance arrangement matters more than the build.
Where a rebuild genuinely pays is when the structure is the constraint: you cannot publish without a developer, the site cannot be made fast, or it cannot support what the business now sells.
How much do web development services cost?
Fixed price against a defined scope. Web projects quoted by the hour tend to expand until somebody runs out of patience.
Build review
What your current site gets wrong, how it performs on real devices, what your team cannot change alone, and whether a rebuild is warranted. Free.
Design and build
Architecture, design, front end, content management, integrations and launch. Fixed scope and price, quoted after the review.
Ongoing support
Maintenance, updates and iteration afterwards. Optional, and the thing that decides whether the build is still good in three years.
Complexity drives the price far more than page count does. Twenty straightforward pages is a smaller project than five carrying integrations, custom logic and a migration.
Development alongside the rest of the marketing
Technical SEO services
Crawl, index and structure. Most technical SEO problems are development decisions that nobody consulted an SEO about first.
See technical SEO →Core Web Vitals optimization
For sites already built, where the job is recovering performance rather than designing it in from the start.
See Core Web Vitals →SEO migration services
Any rebuild changes URLs. This is the discipline that stops a redesign quietly costing you the rankings you already had.
See SEO migration →Common questions about web development
Because nothing was stopping it. A site launches fast because somebody optimised it once, and then a tag manager, a chat widget, tracking pixels, a video embed and an uncompressed hero image all arrive over the following year. Each addition is individually reasonable and nothing in the process measures the cumulative effect. A performance budget enforced in the build pipeline is what makes a regression fail before it reaches production.
A ceiling on things like page weight, blocking scripts and Core Web Vitals thresholds, checked automatically when changes are deployed. If a change breaks the budget, the build fails and somebody has to decide consciously whether it is worth it. It is normal practice in product engineering and unusual in agency web builds, which is why so many sites decay.
A well chosen theme, configured properly, is the right answer more often than the web industry likes to admit. Custom earns its place when your content model is genuinely unusual, when you need functionality no plugin covers, or when the site is the product. We will tell you which of those applies, including when the answer is none of them.
Complexity decides it far more than page count. Twenty straightforward pages is a smaller project than five carrying integrations, custom logic and a content migration. The parts that reliably extend timelines are content, third party integrations and decisions that need somebody senior who is busy.
It can, and that is entirely preventable. Rebuilds change URLs, structure and content, and rankings follow all three. The protection is a redirect map prepared and tested before launch, structure preserved where it is working, and a recorded baseline so you can tell a migration problem from a seasonal dip. We run that as part of the project rather than as an afterthought.
That is a build decision, and it is one worth insisting on. Sites built as reusable components and editable blocks let marketing create and change pages independently. Sites built as one-off hand coded pages do not, which turns every campaign into a support ticket and makes the site progressively less used.
Yes, built to WCAG 2.2 Level AA during development rather than audited afterwards. Enforcement has tightened across the EU, the US and other major markets, and the cost difference is substantial: designing for it is close to free, and retrofitting it into a finished site is a project in its own right.
Find out whether you need a rebuild or a repair
We will review how your current site performs on real devices, what your team cannot change without help, and where the structure is holding the business back. Sometimes the honest answer is a set of targeted fixes rather than a new site, and you will hear that if it applies. No obligation, no sales pitch.
Get my free build review- Performance on real devices
- What your team can edit
- Rebuild or repair