Web Development
Custom web development
for South African brands.
We design and build bespoke websites and web platforms for founders, marketing teams, and agencies who have outgrown templates. Fast, accessible, and built to rank — from Cape Town to Joburg and anywhere the pipeline takes us.
The problem
Your website is the front door. A cheap one costs you customers.
Most South African businesses are running on a site that was built in a rush three or four years ago. It loads in six seconds on a Rain connection, the CMS scares the marketing manager, and every new landing page needs a developer. Sales blame marketing, marketing blames the agency, and nobody has touched the homepage since load-shedding became a full-time job.
The worst part is it is measurable. Every extra second of load time costs you roughly 20% of mobile bounce. A poor Core Web Vitals score quietly drags your Google rankings down while your competitors invest in speed. Meanwhile the WhatsApp-shaped icon in the corner is the only thing actually converting.
Custom web development fixes this properly. Not a new theme on the same shaky foundation — a rebuild that treats your site as a revenue tool, not a brochure.
What we do
What we actually build.
EcomSolve is a custom web development agency based in Cape Town, serving clients across South Africa and four other markets. We build marketing sites, web applications, booking platforms, member portals, headless storefronts, and internal tools. If it lives in a browser and has to earn its keep, we have probably built one.
Every site is designed from scratch in Figma, then engineered on a modern stack (typically Astro, Next.js, or Svelte for the front end; Cloudflare Workers or Vercel for hosting; Sanity, Payload, or WordPress headless for content). We do not sell a template catalogue. We sell considered design and code you can read without wincing.
We also handle the less glamorous parts that most agencies pretend do not exist — accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.2 AA), GDPR and POPIA-aligned privacy setups, analytics stacks that respect user consent, and SEO foundations that actually hold up when Google pushes a core update.
- — Marketing websites (8 to 40 pages) with editable CMS and brand system
- — Web applications — dashboards, portals, booking flows, SaaS MVPs
- — Headless ecommerce storefronts on Shopify Hydrogen or custom stacks
- — Migration projects: WordPress, Wix, Webflow, Squarespace to modern frameworks
- — Performance and SEO rebuilds for existing sites losing organic traffic
- — Long-term retainers for in-house teams who need a dev partner on tap
Our process
How the work happens.
We run every project the same way: scoped, staged, and boringly predictable. Surprises belong on birthdays, not in invoices.
Discovery & scope
Two-hour workshop, usually in person if you are in the Western Cape or Gauteng, otherwise on Meet. We pull apart the commercial goals, audit the existing site with Screaming Frog and PageSpeed Insights, map the content architecture, and lock a fixed scope document you sign off before we touch Figma.
Design in browser
We skip the 80-page style guide and go straight to high-fidelity Figma designs for five or six key templates. Once you approve the look, we build them in the real browser on a staging URL within two weeks. Feedback happens on the actual thing, not a flat image.
Build & integrate
Full front-end and CMS build, integrations with whatever you need (HubSpot, Zoho, Xero, Sage, SARS e-filing, PayFast, Peach Payments, Yoco, Google Tag Manager, Meta CAPI). Weekly demo calls. Every PR is reviewed. Every page ships with schema markup, a meta-description, and an OG image.
Launch & iterate
DNS cutover happens on a Tuesday morning, never a Friday. Post-launch we monitor Real User Metrics for two weeks, fix anything that wobbles, and hand over documentation and Loom walkthroughs so your team can run the CMS without phoning us every time they need to change a hero image.
Deliverables
What you get.
- Figma design system (components, tokens, responsive specs)
- Production website on your domain with SSL
- Staging environment for future edits
- CMS training videos and written documentation
- Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Console setup
- Accessibility and Lighthouse audit reports
- Full source code in your GitHub organisation
Tech stack
The stack.
- Astro
- Next.js
- SvelteKit
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Sanity
- Payload
- WordPress (headless)
- Shopify Hydrogen
- Cloudflare Workers
- Vercel
- Figma
Proof
Built for South African operating conditions.
We rebuilt the marketing site for a Stellenbosch fintech last year. Their previous Webflow site was taking 5.8 seconds to load on a median South African mobile connection. We moved them to an Astro site on Cloudflare with image compression, proper caching headers, and a trimmed-down JS bundle. Load time dropped to 0.9 seconds, mobile conversion from paid traffic lifted 41% in the following quarter, and organic signups grew 2.4x over six months.
Another project: a Durban-based logistics company running a legacy booking tool on Classic ASP (yes, really). We migrated to a Next.js front end with a Postgres backend on Hyperdrive, preserved every URL with 301 redirects, and cut their ops team’s daily admin time from 90 minutes to under 15.
FAQ
Common questions, real answers.
How much does custom web development cost in South Africa?
Typical EcomSolve builds run R85,000 to R350,000 depending on scope. A marketing site with 8 to 12 pages sits near the lower end. Booking flows, member areas, multi-language sites, and custom integrations (payment gateways, ERPs, CRMs) push budgets higher. We quote fixed scope, not hourly, so you know the total before we start. VAT is billed separately at 15%.
How long does a web development project take?
Marketing sites finish in 4 to 6 weeks from kickoff. Platform builds with custom backends and integrations take 8 to 14 weeks. We work in two-week sprints with a live staging link from week one, so you can watch it take shape rather than waiting for a big reveal.
Do you build on WordPress, or do you use custom frameworks?
Both, depending on the job. For content-heavy sites that clients need to edit daily, WordPress or Sanity CMS earns its keep. For performance-critical work (landing pages, web apps, SEO plays), we build on Astro, Next.js, or SvelteKit and host on Cloudflare Workers or Vercel. We do not default to one stack — we pick what fits the brief.
Will the site be fast on mobile networks in South Africa?
Yes. Every build ships with a 90+ Lighthouse mobile score and Core Web Vitals in the green. We host on edge networks with South African POPs (Cloudflare has nodes in Johannesburg and Cape Town), compress images to WebP or AVIF, and lazy-load anything below the fold. Pages load in under 1.5 seconds on a 4G connection.
What happens after launch?
You get 30 days of free support to sort any teething issues. After that we offer monthly care plans (security patches, plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and a small pool of change hours) from R2,500 per month. You own the code and the hosting account — nothing is locked to us.
Ready to rebuild the front door?
Send a short brief or a link to your current site. We reply within one working day, usually with two or three questions and a rough budget band before we book a call. No forms, no pitch decks.