Will my site be fast, accessible and found on Google?

Fast and accessible, yes. Both are built in from the start, and everything we build meets WCAG 2.2 AA as standard. Google will be able to find and read every page. What we can’t promise is a ranking, because that depends on far more than the code.

Here’s what each one covers, and where our work stops and yours starts.

Performance

A slow product loses people before they’ve seen what it does. So we build for the phone most of your users actually own, not the newest one on our desks.

That means small pages, images sized for the screen they’re shown on, and nothing loaded before it’s needed. It also means monitoring after launch. When something breaks or slows down, you should find out before your users tell you.

Speed isn’t always about pages. It’s also about not asking people to wait for things they didn’t need. Electragram guests reply to an invitation in seconds, straight from the message, without downloading anything. The fastest app is sometimes the one nobody has to install.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is about helping Google and others find, read and rank your pages. Part of it is technical, and that part is ours.

We set up the technical basics on every website: page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, sharing previews and clean addresses. Pages are built so a search engine can read them properly, which is not true of every modern site.

Speed feeds into this too. Google measures how quickly pages load and respond, through what it calls Core Web Vitals. A product built to be quick gives your content a fair start.

What we can’t do for your rankings

The technical side gets you into the race. What wins it is content people search for, and other sites linking to yours. That takes months of steady work after launch.

We’ll set you up to do that work, with a CMS your team can edit and analytics that show what’s working. Whether we help with the marketing itself is covered in do you help with marketing or growth?

Apps are different again. Search engines don’t index what’s inside a native app, so an app is found through its store listing and your website. If search matters to you, plan for a website alongside the app.

Accessibility

Accessibility means disabled people can use what you’ve built. That includes people who are blind or partially sighted, who can’t use a mouse, or who find dense screens hard to process. It also helps everyone using a phone one-handed on a train, holding a coffee.

Everything we build meets WCAG 2.2 AA as standard. That’s the level UK public sector sites are expected to meet. In practice, it covers things like:

• text with enough contrast to read
• every action reachable with a keyboard
• labels a screen reader can announce
• layouts that still work when someone enlarges the text
• forms that explain errors clearly

We check accessibility with automated tools and by hand, including with a keyboard and a screen reader. Automated checks alone catch only part of the problem.

Public bodies hold suppliers to this standard, and so do we. We’re a supplier on DOS7, and do you work with the public sector? explains how public buyers commission us.

Why we build it in, not on

Accessibility added at the end means redesigning screens that were already signed off. Speed added at the end means rewriting what was already built. Both cost far more late than early.

This matters most for products used by the public, and by organisations that buy for them. Government buyers, care providers and large employers ask about accessibility before they sign.

How we design for this from the first screen is on our design services page.

Phones and browsers get their own article in will it work on all devices and browsers?