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Custom-built websites designed around your customers and how Google ranks them. No templates. No page builders. Every project starts with a free scoping call and a fixed-price quote within 48 hours, so you know the budget and timeline before any code is written.
What it unlocks
Built for businesses ready to leave page-builders behind: brochure sites, service sites, content-heavy publications, lead-gen sites, and anything where performance, rankings, and editorial flexibility need to coexist.
Capabilities
Engagement rhythm
Free scoping call and fixed-price quote
Discovery and design
Build and SEO foundations
Launch and review
What we do
Every layout starts from your brand, your audience, and the actions you want them to take. Not a theme. Not a page-builder template. Not your competitor's site with the colours swapped. Designed in Figma, signed off before any code is written, built as bespoke components so nothing on the live site is templated.
Lightweight code, optimised images, sensible defaults. Lighthouse 95+ across performance, accessibility, best practice, and SEO is the target on every project, not a stretch. Page-builder sites routinely ship at 40-60. Templated WordPress sites at 60-75. Bespoke sites at 95+. The gap matters because Google penalises slow sites in rankings and slow sites lose conversions before the buyer reads the headline.
Schema, sitemaps, headings, internal linking, Core Web Vitals: baked in at build time. The site is rankable from day one, not retrofitted six months after launch when the SEO agency you hired tells you the foundations were never there. Structured data deployed natively (not relying on plugins to render it correctly). Open Graph, Twitter Cards, canonical tags configured per page.
Forms, CTAs, trust signals, and content blocks placed where they earn their keep. Reviewed against real Search Console and analytics data after launch, not parked once the site goes live. We treat the first 30 days post-launch as a CRO phase: heatmap data, session recordings, conversion funnels measured, friction surfaced and fixed.
Custom Meta Box fields (WordPress) or content collections (Astro) give you the controls that matter: copy, images, CTAs, section toggles, without the bloat or fragility of a page builder. Your team edits content, not layout templates. Your developer (if you have one in-house) maintains a clean codebase, not a fork of someone else's plugin.
Future-proof code. No plugin lock-in. Clean handover documentation. Optional ongoing support if you want it. The site is yours: source code in your Git repo, hosting in your name, no licences in our agency's name. We do not hold the keys; the licence is yours; the database is yours. You can leave any time.
How an engagement runs
30-minute call to understand the goal, the audience, the rough page-set, and any technical constraints (CMS preference, integrations needed). Within 48 hours: fixed-price quote with line-itemed scope and timeline. No estimate ranges; no scope-creep mid-build.
Content inventory if you have existing content to migrate. IA design: sitemap, navigation, page templates. Wireframes for key page types. Visual design in Figma. Sign-off on design before any code. Brand guidelines extended into a real digital design system rather than 'use these colours sometimes'.
Front-end built in Astro, Next.js, or static HTML depending on what fits. Headless WordPress for the CMS if editorial needs it; static MDX or markdown if it does not. Schema deployed per page type. Sitemap generated. Forms wired (HubSpot, Mailchimp, or custom backend). Analytics and conversion tracking installed. Staging walkthroughs at the midpoint and pre-launch.
Launch including 301 redirects from the old URL structure (if applicable), Search Console re-verification, sitemap submission. First 30 days are bug-fix-included. Optional ongoing retainer for content updates, new page builds, or CRO work.
The lay of the land
The standard pattern: a small business pays for a low-cost WordPress site built on Elementor, Divi, or WPBakery. The agency drops in a template, swaps the colours, plugs in seven plugins (Yoast, WPForms, WP Rocket, Smush, contact forms, Cookie banner, CRM integration), hands it over. Two years later: Lighthouse 35, organic traffic flat, no one in-house knows how to edit the design, the page-builder licence has lapsed twice and three plugins broke after a WordPress update. The cycle restarts with a new agency.
A bespoke build costs more upfront and lasts longer. Lighthouse stays above 90 because the code was written for performance, not the result of a page-builder rendering layered div soup. SEO foundations were baked in, so organic growth from month six is real. The editorial controls are designed for your team's actual workflow, not the page-builder's idea of what they need. Six years on, the site still performs.
The third option (rarely used but increasingly viable) is static-site generation with a headless CMS: Astro or Next.js for the front end, WordPress or Sanity for the editorial layer, Cloudflare Pages or Vercel for hosting. Best-of-both: editorial flexibility, sub-second page loads, near-zero hosting cost, and a codebase that survives the agency churn most websites cannot. We are happy to build any of the three; the recommendation follows the goal, not the agency stack we prefer.
FAQ
Depends on the size of the page set, CMS choice, design ambition, and any custom integrations. The scoping call ends with a fixed-price quote within 48 hours, line-itemed by scope and timeline. No estimate ranges, no scope-creep mid-build.
Depends on editorial needs and team. WordPress (with custom Gutenberg blocks, no page builder) for content-heavy sites with non-technical editors. Astro for marketing sites where editorial happens monthly rather than daily, with sub-second load times as a hard requirement. Next.js for sites with interactive front-end requirements (app-like behaviour, complex user state). We will recommend based on your team, not on what we prefer to write.
No. Page builders trade short-term editorial flexibility for long-term performance, SEO, and maintainability cost. If your editorial workflow genuinely needs page-builder-like composition, we build custom Gutenberg blocks (or Astro content collections) that give comparable control without the bloat.
Schema deployed per page type (Organization, Service, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, Article, Product). Sitemap auto-generated. Internal linking patterns built into the IA. Heading hierarchy enforced. Meta tags configurable per page. Open Graph and Twitter Cards rendered correctly. Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) tuned. The site ranks from day one because the foundations are right, not because we layered an SEO plugin on top of a broken architecture.
We recommend (and configure) hosting in your name. Cloudflare Pages for static sites (free, fast, global CDN), Vercel for Next.js, Cloudways or Kinsta for WordPress. Hosting bills come to you, not us; we are not the gatekeeper. If you want us to manage hosting ongoing, that can be an optional retainer.
Optional retainer. Pay per month for ongoing content updates, new page builds, design tweaks, and proactive maintenance (security patches, WordPress core updates, plugin reviews). Or pay project-by-project as you need things. Either is fine; you are not locked in.
Yes, and this is the part most agencies skip. 301 redirects mapped from the old URL structure to the new, comprehensive. Internal linking preserved. Schema and metadata migrated. Search Console resubmitted with the new sitemap. We treat SEO continuity as a deliverable of the redesign, not a 'see how it goes' afterthought.
Everything we do
Pick any other engagement that fits your business, or take the whole stack from one senior team.
Custom Shopify themes, performance-tuned from launch, conversion-led PDPs, SEO and Merchant Centre wired clean.
Custom WooCommerce themes that perform like Shopify, with the editorial flexibility and ownership of WordPress.
Custom WordPress sites built code-first as the default, with the option of a properly configured page builder when your team needs ongoing editorial freedom.
We update, back up, monitor, and patch your WordPress site every week so a stale plugin never takes your business offline.
Technical SEO, content, local, schema, and Search Console health, run as a retainer and measured against revenue.
Most Shopify SEO is left to an app that emits duplicate or invalid schema. We do the work in Liquid, where it belongs.
WooCommerce SEO done at theme and plugin level, not delegated to the Yoast WooCommerce add-on.
WordPress SEO done at theme, plugin, and hosting level, not delegated to a Yoast or Rank Math settings page.
Optimisation for answer surfaces: Google AI Overviews, Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, and voice assistants. Schema-first, data-led, tied to organic revenue.
Optimisation for generative AI surfaces: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and agentic checkout. Content structured for LLM ingestion, product feeds tuned for shopping agents, LLM mention tracking on a retainer.
We build Google Ads accounts around conversions: tight structure, clean tracking, landing pages that match the query.
Paid search, paid social, SEO, content, and analytics run by the same senior people, with reporting tied to pipeline.
Most PPC agencies run Google only. We run Google plus Microsoft Ads in parallel, with cross-channel tracking and audience strategy.
Shopping and Performance Max are the start, not the strategy. We run the full funnel for ecommerce accounts, with margin context, not just ROAS.
Shopify-specific Google Ads work: native Merchant Centre integration, customer-list sync, Shopify Audiences, and PDP-level CRO.
Service businesses optimise to form fills. We optimise to sales-qualified leads and closed-won revenue, wired into your CRM.
We run Facebook and Instagram Ads with senior account managers, server-side tracking, and continuous creative testing so spend earns its keep.
No templates. No page builders. Bespoke websites with Lighthouse 95+, SEO foundations baked in, and CMS controls that make sense.
Custom-built ecommerce, sized to your catalogue and ops. Shopify, WooCommerce, or custom-built; the platform follows the business model.
Cape Town-focused SEO: local pack and Google Business Profile, technical foundations, content, and GSC discipline, run as a retainer and measured against revenue.
Cape Town web design agency. Bespoke builds, Lighthouse 95+, SEO foundations baked in, CMS controls your team can actually use. In-person discovery meetings across the city.
Bespoke website builds engineered around your stack, your integrations, and how the site has to perform under real load. Custom code, headless where it fits, observability and security treated as deliverables.
Continuous CRO: diagnose where the funnel leaks, run hypothesis-led tests, measure against revenue, not vanity engagement metrics.