Website development guides
Everything we publish on planning, designing, building, launching and maintaining a website. Written in house, reviewed on a schedule, free to read.
40 guides
When to Redesign Your Website (and When Not To)
The signals that justify a website redesign, the ones that do not, why full redesigns often lose traffic, and the incremental alternative that usually performs better.
Website Monitoring: Knowing Before Your Customers Do
What to monitor beyond "is the site up": broken forms, failed payments, expiring certificates, performance drift and error rates — and how to avoid alert fatigue.
Website Backup Strategy: What to Back Up and How Often
How to design a backup strategy that actually restores: what to include, retention, where to store copies, and why an untested backup does not count.
Website Security: The Practices That Prevent Most Incidents
The security work that stops the attacks websites actually face — outdated software, weak credentials, exposed admin areas and unvalidated input — plus what to do after a compromise.
Website Maintenance: What It Actually Involves
What ongoing website maintenance covers, how much it costs, what a maintenance retainer should include, and how to tell whether you are getting it.
eCommerce SEO: The Practices That Actually Matter
How to structure a store so category and product pages can rank: faceted navigation, product URLs, out-of-stock handling, structured data and internal linking.
Payment Gateway Integration: What Developers Need to Get Right
How payment integration actually works, why webhooks rather than redirects should update orders, and the failure cases that cost real money if they are not handled.
WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Magento: A Practical Comparison
The three platforms most stores choose between, compared by who should run them, what they cost in practice, where each one breaks and what leaving involves.
eCommerce Platforms Compared: How to Choose
How to choose between hosted and self-hosted commerce platforms by what your store actually needs — catalogue complexity, markets, integrations, total cost and exit risk.
eCommerce Website Development: The Complete Guide
What building an online store involves beyond a catalogue and a checkout: tax, shipping, payments, stock, migration and the operational work that follows launch.
SEO-Friendly URL Structure: Rules That Still Matter
How to name and organise URLs so they stay stable: length, words, hierarchy, parameters, multilingual patterns and how to change a URL without losing traffic.
Multilingual Website Development: Structure, URLs and Workflow
How to build a website in several languages so each version can rank: URL patterns, hreflang, translation workflow, and the decisions that are painful to reverse.
Site Speed Optimisation: A Practical Order of Work
Where website speed actually goes and how to get it back, in the order that produces the largest improvement per hour spent — images, server, scripts, fonts and third parties.
Core Web Vitals for Developers: What Actually Moves the Numbers
What LCP, CLS and INP measure, the specific causes behind bad scores, and the fixes that produce real improvement rather than a better lab test.
CMS Migration: How to Move Without Losing Traffic
A step-by-step approach to moving a site to a new CMS: content audit, mapping, URL preservation, redirects, testing and the post-launch weeks that decide the outcome.
Technical SEO Checklist for Website Developers
A working checklist of the technical SEO items a developer owns: indexing controls, canonicals, redirects, structured data, pagination, faceted navigation and international setup.
WordPress vs Webflow vs a Custom Build
Three common answers for a business website compared by who maintains them, what they cost over three years, where each hits a limit, and how hard each is to leave.
Website Development SEO Basics: What to Build In
The SEO work that belongs in the build rather than in a campaign afterwards: crawlability, titles, structure, speed and the things that are expensive to retrofit.
Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS: Which Fits Your Site?
What headless actually changes, the capabilities you give up, when the flexibility is worth the extra build, and the middle options between the two.
Do You Need a Design System for Your Website?
When a design system pays for itself and when it is overhead: what a minimum useful system contains, what it costs to maintain, and the lighter alternatives.
How to Become a Website Developer: A Realistic Path
What to learn and in what order, how long it actually takes, what a portfolio needs to show, and how to find first clients — written for people starting from zero.
What Is a CMS and Do You Actually Need One?
What a content management system does, when a site genuinely needs one, what it costs in maintenance, and the alternatives for sites that change rarely.
Questions to Ask a Web Developer Before You Hire
The questions that reveal how a website project will actually go — about process, ownership, handover and failure — and what the answers tell you.
Website Accessibility: What to Fix First
A practical order of work for making a website accessible: the fixes with the largest effect, how to test without specialist tools, and what an overlay widget does not solve.
Website Development Contract: What to Check Before Signing
The clauses that decide what happens when a website project goes wrong: ownership, scope, payments, revisions, post-launch support and termination.
Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before You Go Live
The checks that matter before a website goes live — technical, content, SEO, legal and analytics — plus what to verify in the first hour and the first week afterwards.
Freelancer, Agency or In-House: Which Fits Your Project?
The three ways to get a website built, compared by cost, risk, speed and what happens when the person who built it is unavailable.
How to Hire a Website Developer: A Practical Process
How to shortlist, evaluate and choose a website developer: what to send, what to ask, which signals predict a good project, and the red flags worth walking away from.
Responsive Web Design: A Practical Guide
How responsive design actually works in a website development project: breakpoints, images, touch targets, tables and the mobile failures that testing on a desktop never finds.
Website Structure and Sitemap: How to Plan Your Pages
How to organise pages so visitors find things and search engines understand the site: depth, navigation limits, URL patterns and the structure mistakes that are expensive to undo.
Website Design Principles That Actually Affect Results
The design decisions that measurably change what visitors do — hierarchy, contrast, load order, form design and clarity — separated from the ones that are only taste.
How to Write a Website Requirements Document
A requirements document short enough that people read it and specific enough to price against — what to include, what to leave out, and the out-of-scope list that prevents most disputes.
The Web Design Process, Step by Step
What happens between a brief and a signed-off design: discovery, structure, wireframes, visual design and handover — and where projects usually stall.
How Much Does a Website Cost? Real Ranges by Project Type
What website development actually costs by project type, what drives the number up, the running costs nobody quotes, and how to read a quote that looks suspiciously cheap.
How to Plan a Website: The Complete Planning Guide
What to decide before anyone writes code: goals, audience, pages, content and budget — and the four planning decisions that cause most website development projects to run late.
The Website Development Tools That Actually Matter
The categories of tooling a website development project needs — version control, environments, builds, testing, monitoring — and how to tell whether your developer has them.
Custom Website Development vs Templates: How to Choose
When a template is the right answer and when it becomes expensive: the real cost difference, the ceilings you hit, and the hybrid approach most sites end up using.
The Website Development Process Explained
The seven phases of a website development project, what each one produces, how long each typically takes, and the sign-off that should close it.
How Does Website Development Work? The Full Process
What actually happens between signing a quote and going live: environments, sprints, reviews, testing and handover — and what your side of the project has to deliver.
What Is Website Development? A Complete Guide
What website development covers, how it differs from web design, what front-end and back-end actually mean, and which parts your project needs.