Web Design Portsmouth — Design, Hosting, eCommerce & SEO From £450

Our 5-page starter website starts from £450 (excluding VAT) — this includes design, development, mobile responsiveness, contact form, basic on-page SEO, and Google Analytics setup. Our Business plan with WordPress CMS and up to 10 pages starts from £950. eCommerce sites with WooCommerce or Shopify and Stripe payment integration start from £1,500. Fully bespoke custom builds, portals, and web applications are scoped and quoted individually after a free discovery call. Hosting and domain registration are charged separately.

The £450 starter site includes a professionally designed 5-page website (typically Home, About, Services, Contact, and one page of your choice), mobile-responsive layout, contact form with email notification, basic on-page SEO (meta titles, descriptions, heading structure), Google Analytics integration, Google Search Console setup and sitemap submission, and SSL certificate. Domain registration and hosting are charged separately (shared hosting from £10/month). It does not include copywriting — you supply the text and images, or we can quote for copywriting as an add-on.

Honestly — no, not for competitive terms. A new website with no domain history takes time to earn Google's trust. For broad commercial keywords in your industry, expect 6–12 months before significant organic visibility — this applies to every new site regardless of who builds it. Where we can move faster is local search ("your service + Portsmouth/Hampshire" style queries) and long-tail terms with lower competition. With proper local SEO and Google Business Profile optimisation, 2–4 months can produce meaningful local results. We set up the technical foundations correctly from day one — this is the difference between a site that climbs over time and one that never does — but we will always give you realistic, honest timescales for your specific industry and target keywords.

Cloudflare is a global network (CDN and security service) that sits between your website and the internet. It filters malicious traffic — bots, scrapers, DDoS attacks — before it reaches your server. It also caches your content at data centres worldwide, so visitors load your site from a server close to them rather than your single UK server — improving load times globally. In 2025, Cloudflare is not a luxury — it is standard practice for any serious website. We include Cloudflare configuration on all hosting plans at no extra charge. For eCommerce sites handling customer data and payments, it is essential.

Yes. We build eCommerce sites on WooCommerce (WordPress) and Shopify, and integrate Stripe, PayPal, and other payment gateways. We handle the complete setup — Stripe account configuration, product catalogues, checkout flow, tax rules, shipping zones, discount codes, order management, and customer account creation. We also configure Cloudflare and SSL specifically for transactional sites to ensure customer data is protected. eCommerce starts from £1,500 for a straightforward WooCommerce build with up to ~50 products.

Shared hosting places your website on a server alongside other websites, sharing the server's resources (CPU, RAM, storage). Our shared hosting uses quality infrastructure with resource management — it is not the £1/month hosting that puts thousands of sites on one machine. Shared hosting is appropriate for most brochure sites, CMS sites, and small to medium eCommerce. Dedicated hosting gives your website its own allocated server resources — suitable for high-traffic sites, large eCommerce platforms, SaaS applications, or any site requiring guaranteed performance, custom server configuration, or resource isolation. Both include Cloudflare, SSL, and daily backups.

Yes — WordPress is our primary platform for content-managed websites. It powers over 43% of all websites globally and offers an excellent balance of flexibility, SEO capability, and ease of use once configured. We build on WordPress with clean, fast, well-coded themes — not bloated page builders that create performance problems. We train you to manage your own content after handover. We also build on Shopify for dedicated eCommerce, and develop fully bespoke solutions without a CMS for applications where performance, security, or custom functionality requirements make a CMS inappropriate.

You do — completely. Once the project is paid for in full, the website design, code, and content belongs to you. Your domain is registered in your name and remains yours regardless of whether you continue using our hosting or maintenance services. If you choose to move to a different host, we provide a full site export and assist with migration. We do not use proprietary platforms that lock you in — your website is your asset.

A standard 5-page starter site typically takes 2–3 weeks from receipt of content to going live. The Business WordPress site takes 3–5 weeks. eCommerce sites take 4–8 weeks depending on product count and complexity. Bespoke applications are scoped individually. The biggest factor affecting timeline is content — the sooner you can supply text, images, and brand assets, the faster we can build. We give you a clear timeline in the proposal and flag immediately if anything is at risk of affecting it.

Yes — and this is something that is badly mishandled by many web designers. When redesigning, we audit your existing site's URL structure and rankings before touching anything. If we change URLs (sometimes necessary to improve structure), we implement 301 permanent redirects from old to new URLs so Google transfers the existing ranking signals to the new pages. We also preserve your existing meta data as a baseline and migrate all content with the correct attributes. Done correctly, a redesign can improve rankings by improving technical performance and structure — done incorrectly, it can destroy them overnight. We know the difference.

Site speed matters enormously — for both users and Google. Google uses Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID/INP, CLS) as ranking signals. A site that scores poorly on these is disadvantaged in search results compared to competitors with faster sites. For users, Google's own data shows that as page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving increases by 32%. At 10 seconds, that probability is 123% higher than a 1-second site. Speed problems are usually caused by unoptimised images, bloated plugins, poor hosting, no caching, or no Cloudflare. We can audit and fix your existing site's performance, or rebuild it correctly from scratch.

Yes. Our ongoing SEO service starts from £200/month and includes keyword research, monthly content recommendations, local SEO optimisation, Google Business Profile management, technical SEO monitoring (crawl errors, broken links, Core Web Vitals), and a monthly plain-English report. More comprehensive campaigns including active link building and content production are scoped individually. We do not tie you into long contracts — monthly rolling arrangements with 30 days notice, because the results should justify the continuation.

Schema markup is structured data added to your website's code that tells Google — in a machine-readable format — exactly what your content is. A LocalBusiness schema tells Google your business name, address, phone number, opening hours, and service area. A FAQPage schema allows your FAQ answers to appear directly in search results as rich snippets. A Product schema displays prices and availability in search results. These do not directly guarantee higher rankings, but they improve how your listing appears in results (more visible, more informative) which improves click-through rate — and click-through rate is itself a ranking signal. We implement relevant schema on every site we build.

Budget hosting at companies like GoDaddy or 123-Reg often places thousands of websites on a single server with minimal resource management. One compromised or high-traffic site on the same server affects all others. Support is overseas and ticket-based. Our hosting uses quality UK infrastructure with resource allocation, server-level security hardening, Cloudflare integration, daily verified backups, and local engineers who monitor the sites we host. When something goes wrong you speak to us — the same team that built your site. From £10/month for shared hosting. Dedicated plans from £60/month.

Yes. We are based in Portsmouth but work with clients across Hampshire, the South East, and nationally. Web design and hosting projects are managed entirely remotely — discovery calls via video, designs shared on a staging URL for review, and all hosting managed from our Portsmouth base. Local clients who prefer face-to-face meetings are welcome to visit our office or we can come to you. There is no price premium for working with us remotely.