Web development judged on a phone, not in a design review.
Your buyer opens the site on a three-year-old Android, on hotel wifi, with twelve tabs already open. That is the machine the site has to be fast on — so that is the machine we measure it on, and the number goes in the contract.
Web development is building the sites and browser-based applications a business runs on — marketing sites, content platforms, portals and internal tools. Canopus builds them in Next.js, Laravel and WordPress, against explicit Core Web Vitals and accessibility budgets, with the technical SEO foundations included rather than sold separately afterwards.
Three tiers, and the honest limit at the bottom
Every tier includes the technical SEO foundation, the performance budget, accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA and full ownership of the result.
Marketing site
Enquiry-focused4–7 weeks · 8–15 pagesThe site that has to explain what you do and produce enquiries. Most B2B companies need exactly this and no more.
- Custom design on your brand, not a bought theme
- WordPress or Next.js, your choice after a conversation
- Structured content fields your team can edit safely
- Forms with spam protection and CRM handoff
- Technical SEO, schema and sitemap included
Content platform
Publishing operation8–14 weeks · many templatesWhen the site is a publishing operation — resources, case studies, a knowledge base, several audiences.
- Everything in Marketing site
- Multiple content types and reusable block library
- On-site search and faceted filtering
- Editorial workflow, drafts and scheduled publishing
- Multi-author profiles and author archives
- Analytics events on every conversion path
Web application
Behind a login12+ weeks · accounts & workflowLogins, roles, dashboards, data. At this point it's software with a public front door — see custom software.
- Authentication, roles and permissions
- Customer or partner portal areas
- Integration with your existing systems
- Admin console for your own team
- Audit trail and reporting
We don't take website projects under $3,000
Below that number, a well-chosen template on WordPress or Squarespace, set up by a competent freelancer, will genuinely serve you better than we will. We'd be charging you for coordination overhead rather than engineering. If that's your budget, we'll say so on the first call and point you at a sensible route instead — it costs us a project and saves you a bad one.
WordPress, Next.js or Laravel?
There is no universally right answer, and any agency that only offers one will tell you theirs is it.
| If this matters most | WordPress | Next.js | Laravel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-technical staff publish weekly | Best — the editor everyone already knows | Good with a headless CMS behind it | Needs an admin built for it |
| Raw page speed and CWV headroom | Achievable with discipline and caching | Best — static and edge rendering by default | Good with caching |
| Logins, roles and business logic | Fights you past a certain point | Fine with a separate API | Best — it's an application framework |
| Hosting cost and simplicity | Cheapest, runs anywhere | Low on Vercel/Netlify, higher self-hosted | Standard application hosting |
| Plugin ecosystem | Enormous — also the main security surface | Libraries, not plugins | Mature packages, fewer of them |
| Ongoing security maintenance | Highest — core, theme and plugin updates monthly | Lowest — no public admin to attack | Moderate, framework-level updates |
| Hiring your own developer later | Easiest and cheapest anywhere | Plentiful, more expensive | Plentiful, especially in Asia and Europe |
Scroll the table sideways for all three columns.
Our most common recommendation for a B2B company is WordPress for the marketing site and a separate Laravel or Next.js application for anything behind a login. Two systems, each doing what it's good at, joined by SSO — rather than one heroic WordPress install with forty plugins that nobody dares update.
The performance budget is a contract term, not a hope
Every site we build ships with numeric limits written into the specification, checked in CI on every deploy, and verified at handover on a throttled connection. Miss them and the fix is our cost.
This matters because "we'll optimise later" never survives contact with a launch deadline. A budget decided before design starts changes real decisions — how many web fonts, whether that hero carousel exists, whether the chat widget loads on first paint or on interaction.
- Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5sHero image preloaded, never lazy-loaded, served as WebP or AVIF at the right size.
- Interaction to Next Paint under 200msThird-party scripts deferred; nothing blocking the main thread on first interaction.
- Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1Explicit width and height on every image and embed. No content that jumps when a font loads.
- Under 1MB on first loadImages 500KB, CSS 150KB, and a hard question asked about every script anyone wants to add.
The technical SEO foundation, at no extra cost
None of this is an upsell. It's what "built properly" means, and retrofitting it later costs more than doing it once.
- Unique title and meta description per pageWritten, not generated from the H1.
- Self-referencing canonical tagsOne URL form, consistent trailing slash, HTTPS throughout.
- Structured data linked into one graphOrganization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList and page-type schema — not isolated snippets.
- Server-rendered contentText, headings and links present with JavaScript disabled.
- XML sitemap with accurate lastmodIndexable 200-status URLs only, linked from robots.txt.
- Clean, stable, lowercase URLsFrozen at publish; changes go through 301s with no chains.
- Open Graph and Twitter cards1200×630 images with dimensions and alt text declared.
- Semantic heading hierarchyOne H1, no skipped levels, headings that describe content rather than decorate it.
What isn't included: keyword research, content strategy, digital PR and ongoing optimisation. Those are continuous work rather than build tasks, and they live under digital marketing and SEO.
Rebuilding a site that already ranks
The most expensive way to lose traffic is a redesign done well visually and badly technically. This is the sequence we follow.
Crawl and baseline before anything changes
A full crawl of the current site, every indexed URL from Search Console, current rankings and current Core Web Vitals. Without a baseline, nobody can tell afterwards whether the drop was the migration or the season.
Map every URL to a destination
Every old URL gets an explicit new home or a documented reason for a 410. Redirects are single-hop — no chains, no redirecting to a redirect, which is where most of the equity leaks.
Preserve what's earning
Pages that already rank keep their title structure, heading hierarchy and internal links. A redesign can change how a page looks without changing what it says — and on your top twenty pages, it should.
Launch, then watch for eight weeks
Search Console coverage, index status and rankings compared against baseline weekly. Migration damage typically surfaces in week three, not week one, so the monitoring window matters more than launch day itself.
Cost, platform, speed and migration
How much does a website cost?
It comes down to how much of the site is template and how much is system: how many distinct templates the design needs, how much of the content has to be structured and editable rather than hard-coded, and whether anything sits behind a login. A brochure site and a content platform with search, editorial workflow and multiple authors are different pieces of engineering, so we quote them after a short paid discovery — you leave that with a fixed written estimate, a sitemap and a specification you own, whether or not you build it with us. We don't take website projects under $3,000 — below that a good template will serve you better than we will.
WordPress, Laravel or Next.js — which should we use?
WordPress when non-technical staff publish frequently and the site is mostly content. Next.js when performance and search visibility are commercial priorities, or the front end needs to consume an API. Laravel when the site is really an application with a public face. The wrong choice is picking a headless stack for a five-page brochure nobody will edit.
Will the site actually be fast?
We write a performance budget into the specification: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 — measured on a mid-range Android over throttled 4G, not on a desktop. If a build misses the budget at handover, fixing it is our cost, not a change request.
Do you handle SEO as part of the build?
Technical SEO is part of every build at no extra cost — semantic markup, unique titles and meta descriptions, canonicals, structured data, sitemap, robots directives, internal linking and clean URLs. Keyword research, content strategy and ongoing work sit under digital marketing, because they're continuous rather than a build task.
Can we edit the site ourselves afterwards?
Yes. Content is modelled as structured fields rather than one open rich-text blob, so your team edits real content in real fields and can't accidentally break the layout. We record a short walkthrough per template and leave written editing notes inside the CMS.
How long does a website take to build?
Four to seven weeks for a marketing site once content is ready, 8–14 for a content platform, 12+ for a web application. The biggest cause of delay is content — sites wait on copy and images far more often than on code — so we agree a content deadline in week one and build against placeholders that make gaps obvious.
Do you migrate an existing site without losing rankings?
Yes. We crawl the current site, map every indexed URL to its new destination, implement single-hop 301s, preserve title and heading structure on high-traffic pages, and compare Search Console coverage before and after for eight weeks — because the first crawl after a cutover is rarely the one that tells you anything.
Is the site accessible?
We build to WCAG 2.2 AA: proper heading hierarchy, keyboard access with visible focus states, colour contrast checked against real backgrounds, meaningful alt text and labels, and ARIA only where it's genuinely required. It's tested with a keyboard and a screen reader before handover, not asserted.
Related services
Send us the site you have, or the one you wish you had.
We'll run a real Core Web Vitals check and a crawl before replying, so the first response has findings in it rather than a calendar link.
- Email — [email protected]
- Phone / WhatsApp — +91 817 979 7732
- Under $3,000? We'll say so and point you elsewhere