Web developer in Florence

Businesses in Florence usually come to me after a site has already been built once and disappointed. That is a useful starting point, because it means the requirements are no longer theoretical — you know exactly which parts failed. Rebuilding from a list of specific complaints produces a far better result than rebuilding from a mood board.

One thing worth knowing about building for Italy

Italy mandates electronic invoicing through the SdI exchange system, so any store selling B2B has to produce a compliant XML invoice rather than a PDF. That constraint shapes the order pipeline more than the storefront.

How a Florence project is paid for, and why it is staged

Payment is split across milestones tied to things you can actually look at — a staging URL, a working checkout, a completed migration — rather than to dates on a calendar. You pay for a milestone after reviewing it, in EUR, which means at no point are you more than one stage out of pocket on work you have not seen.

This exists because the alternative puts all the risk on whichever side pays first, and across a border that asymmetry is the thing that makes people nervous. Staging it does not eliminate the risk; it caps it at one milestone, which is small enough to walk away from. That is a more honest offer than a guarantee I could not enforce from here anyway.

Property, lettings and estate agencies in Florence

Property sites live or die on search and filtering. A listing grid that cannot be filtered by the three things buyers actually care about — price, bedrooms, area — sends people to the portals, and once they are on a portal you are competing on fee with every other agency in Florence.

The technical half is feed handling: listings usually arrive from a CRM in a format designed two decades ago, and keeping the site, the portals and the window cards in agreement is where the real work sits. It is worth doing properly, because a property still showing as available after it is let generates the angriest phone calls in the business.

Images shipped at ten times the size they display

A hero photograph exported at 4000 pixels wide and displayed at 400 is the most common single cause of a slow page. The browser downloads all of it and then discards most of it. On a phone over mobile data that is several seconds spent waiting for pixels nobody will ever see.

The fix is generating each image at the sizes actually used, serving AVIF or WebP with a fallback, and setting explicit width and height so the layout does not jump while they load. It is mechanical work with a directly measurable result, which makes it the first thing worth doing on almost any Florence site.

Hiring a developer who is not in Florence

Working across a border adds one genuine obligation most suppliers skip: your customers' personal data ends up being processed in a country their privacy notice probably does not mention. Under EU GDPR that is your liability, not mine. It is handled here before you ask — the mechanism is published, pre-signed and linked from every page on this site.

What I am not claiming about Florence

A location page is the easiest place on a website to imply something untrue, so here is the other side of it plainly:

• I have no office, postal address or phone number in Florence
• I cannot meet you in person, and if that is a requirement you should hire locally
• I am not claiming existing clients in Florence specifically — my live work is listed on the work page and you can check it
• Nothing on this page is a guarantee of search rankings, which no developer can honestly offer

Florence web development — common questions

Do you build on WordPress or something custom?

Whichever the project justifies. WordPress when you need to edit content constantly and want a familiar admin. A static build when speed and security matter more than a plugin ecosystem. Custom PHP and MySQL when the logic is genuinely yours. The choice is explained in the quote with its trade-offs, not presented as a foregone conclusion.

Can you migrate my Florence site without losing rankings?

Yes, and the redirect map is the whole job. Every existing URL is mapped to its new equivalent with a 301 before launch, and anything with no equivalent goes to the closest relevant page rather than the homepage. Sites lose rankings in migration because that mapping was skipped, not because migration is inherently risky.

Do I need to provide the content and images?

Content, yes — you know your business and I do not. I will restructure and edit what you send so it reads for the web, and I will tell you where a section is missing. Photography is worth paying a local photographer for; stock images of people in offices are recognisable as stock and quietly cost you credibility.

Do you actually work with businesses in Florence?

Yes, remotely. I work with Italian clients from Islamabad, quoting in EUR and invoicing in EUR. I have no office, address or phone number in Florence and will not pretend otherwise. If your project needs someone physically present, hire locally — I will say so in the first reply rather than after a deposit.

Can you fix my existing site rather than rebuild it?

Often, yes, and it is usually the cheaper answer. Speed problems, a broken mobile layout, a form that silently fails or missing structured data are all fixable on the site you already have. I will tell you which of the two you need after looking, and a rebuild only gets recommended when the fix would cost more than starting again.

Do you provide ongoing maintenance after launch?

Thirty days of snag fixes are included after launch at no extra cost — anything that does not work as specified gets fixed. Beyond that there are monthly plans for updates, backups, monitoring and small changes. They are optional and cancellable; a site handed over properly does not require a retainer to keep running.

Will the site actually rank in Florence search results?

The build handles what is technically controllable: crawlable HTML, correct headings, structured data, fast pages, a clean sitemap and Search Console set up on day one. Ranking also depends on your competitors, your domain's age and the links pointing at you, which no developer controls. Anyone guaranteeing a position is guessing or lying.

Where this page sits

This page covers Florence. Every other town in Italy is listed on the Italy coverage page, and the full worldwide list is at all locations.

Before you enquire: pricing is published rather than quoted on request, how I work covers the process end to end, the work page lists live client sites you can open, and vendor information answers the procurement questions.