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.

Will the site actually rank in East London 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.

What hours will you be available to us in East London?

My working day lands at 06:00–15:00 in your time, which is roughly 6 hours inside a normal East London working day. In practice you can raise something in the morning and have it answered the same morning, and a scheduled call is easy to place at a civilised hour for both of us.

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.

What payment methods can my East London checkout accept?

For South Africa: Stripe, PayFast, Yoco, Ozow for instant EFT, and SnapScan. The right combination depends on your average basket and your customers, and picking wrong is expensive — the payment method a buyer expects but cannot find is one of the most common reasons a checkout is abandoned at the final step.

South Africa · South Africa

Website speed and performance optimisation in East London

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 East London businesses, quoted in ZAR from $80, typically live in 4 days.

What website speed and performance optimisation includes for a East London 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 East London 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.

What actually ships when a East London project goes live

A handover for a East London client is not a link and a login. It is the repository, the hosting account in your name, the domain registered to you, the payment provider account under your business, and a written record of every credential as it was created rather than dumped in one email at the end.

The test I apply is uncomfortable but correct: if I disappeared tomorrow, could another developer pick this up on Monday without calling me? If the answer is no, the handover is not finished. That standard is why the documentation takes a day I do not bill separately — it is part of the build, not an upsell.

Education and training providers in East London

Course pages are the whole site. Each needs the outcome, the duration, the price, the prerequisites and the next start date visible without scrolling — and each needs to be its own indexable URL, because people search for the course, never for a training provider they have not heard of.

The recurring failure is a single "Courses" page listing twenty courses. It ranks for nothing because it is specifically about nothing. Twenty pages, each genuinely about one course, is more work and is the difference between a site that recruits and a brochure that sits there.

A mobile layout nobody tested on a real phone

Desktop-first builds fail in predictable places: a navigation menu that cannot be closed, a table forcing the whole page sideways, tap targets too close together, and a sticky banner sitting over the button. Each one is invisible on a laptop and each one loses customers.

Most visitors to a East London small business site arrive on a phone, so I design at phone width first and widen from there. That ordering is not a stylistic preference — it is the only way the small screen gets the attention the majority of your traffic deserves.

What I am not claiming about East London

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