Do you actually work with businesses in Cape Town?

Yes, remotely. I work with South African clients from Islamabad, quoting in ZAR and invoicing in ZAR. I have no office, address or phone number in Cape Town 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.

How much does a website cost in Cape Town?

A business website starts from R1,500 and goes live in about three days. An e-commerce build starts from R2,800 in around seven days, and a custom application from R3,700 in ten. Those are starting figures — the exact number is fixed in writing once scope is agreed, and it does not move after that.

Can you migrate my Cape Town 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.

What happens if I am not happy with the result?

Work is delivered in milestones against a written scope, and you review each one on a staging URL before it is paid for. If the delivered milestone does not match the scope, it gets corrected before anything moves forward. That structure exists so disagreement is resolved at the stage it happens rather than at the end when it is expensive.

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.

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.

South Africa · South Africa

Website speed and performance optimisation in Cape Town

A Lighthouse score on a developer laptop with fibre broadband is not a measurement of your site — it is a measurement of the laptop. The work here is judged on field data from real visitors on real phones, which is also the data Google actually uses. For Cape Town businesses, quoted in ZAR from $80, typically live in 4 days.

What website speed and performance optimisation includes for a Cape Town business

Fixed scope, agreed in writing before development starts. From $80, typically live in 4 days.

Field-data baseline from Chrome UX Report where your traffic supports it, plus throttled lab testing where it does not
Largest Contentful Paint work: the actual LCP element identified, then preloaded, resized and served in a modern format
Interaction to Next Paint work, which usually means shipping less JavaScript rather than reordering it
Cumulative Layout Shift eliminated: dimensions on media, reserved space for embeds, metric-matched font fallbacks
Render path fixed — critical CSS, deferred non-essential script, and third-party tags audited for what they cost
Image pipeline: AVIF and WebP with correct srcset, and lazy loading applied below the fold only
Caching and compression configured at the server, including long-lived immutable assets
A before-and-after report with the numbers and the method, so you can reproduce it rather than trust it

The terms for a South African client

Starting price	From $80, quoted and invoiced in ZAR
Typical timeline	4 days once content is supplied
Tax position	VAT at 15%, reverse-charged on imported services
Data protection	POPIA, the Protection of Personal Information Act — resolved by Section 72 of POPIA governs transfers abroad and the DPA records the lawful basis
Payment rails available	Stripe, PayFast, Yoco, Ozow for instant EFT, and SnapScan
My day in Cape Town time	06:00–15:00 — about 6 hours of overlap

Why this matters for South Africa specifically

Data cost and intermittent connectivity are real constraints for a large share of South African visitors, so page weight is a commercial metric here, not a vanity score. I build to a hard kilobyte budget on ZA projects.

The performance budget every Cape Town build is held to

Pages are built to a hard weight limit rather than optimised afterwards, because retrofitting speed onto a heavy site is several times the work of not making it heavy. In practice that means no framework runtime on a content page, fonts subset to the characters actually used, and images generated at the sizes actually displayed.

For South Africa specifically this is a commercial number, not a vanity one. A visitor on mobile data who waits four seconds is frequently a visitor who is gone, and the analytics will record it as a bounce rather than as the lost sale it was. Core Web Vitals is simply the name Google gave to noticing this.

Manufacturing, wholesale and B2B in Cape Town

A B2B site in Cape Town serves two audiences with opposite needs. A buyer wants specifications, tolerances, lead times and a downloadable datasheet. A procurement officer wants your company registration, insurance, certifications and payment terms. Serving both from one undifferentiated "About" page serves neither of them.

The highest-value feature is almost always a searchable product or capability index carrying real part numbers, because that is what engineers search for. It is unglamorous, it is a database problem rather than a design problem, and it produces enquiries that arrive already qualified.

Analytics that has never once been looked at

Most sites carry a tracking tag and no measurement. Nobody defined what counts as a conversion, so the dashboard reports sessions and bounce rate — numbers that move up and down and change no decision anybody makes.

Useful measurement is narrow: form submissions, phone taps, WhatsApp clicks, and which pages preceded them. Four numbers checked monthly beat forty never opened, and knowing which Cape Town search terms actually produce enquiries is what turns the site from a cost into something you can steer.

What I am not claiming about Cape Town

I have no office, postal address or phone number in Cape Town
I cannot meet you in person, and if that is a requirement you should hire locally
I am not claiming existing clients in Cape Town 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