Custom Web Development · Chicago & Nationwide
Web development agency in Chicago building sites that load fast and sell
We write the code. No drag-and-drop builder bolted onto a purchased theme, no plugin stack held together with hope. Custom WordPress, ecommerce, and web applications — engineered to score in the nineties on mobile and simple enough that your marketing coordinator can update a page without filing a ticket.
- Built for Core Web Vitals from the first commit, not patched later
- You get the source code, the repo, and the hosting logins
- Editable by your team — no developer needed for copy changes
- Fixed project pricing, agreed before we start
Get a quote and a speed audit
Tell us what you’re working with. We’ll send back what’s slowing your current site down and a realistic number to fix or replace it.
Real numbers, not a range designed to get a meeting.
The template trap
Your site isn’t slow because of your host
It’s slow because a $59 theme was built to demo well for every industry at once, so it ships with a slider library, three icon fonts, a page builder, and CSS for forty layouts you’ll never use. Then a plugin got added for a contact form, another for SEO, another for sliders again, and each one loads its own scripts on every page.
By launch you’re at four megabytes and eleven seconds on a phone with two bars, and no amount of caching plugin will fix it — because caching makes a bloated page arrive faster, it doesn’t make it smaller.
Writing the theme from scratch means the browser downloads what your site actually uses and nothing else. This site is the example: one stylesheet, one small script, no third-party requests, no framework tax.
- Every image served as WebP, sized for the slot it fills
- No render-blocking third-party scripts or web fonts
- Layout shift designed out, not chased after launch
- Accessible markup: keyboard navigation, real focus states, honest headings
What we build
Custom web development services in Chicago
From a five-page site that needs to load in under two seconds to an internal portal three departments depend on.
Custom WordPress development
Hand-coded themes and purpose-built plugins. Block-based editing so your team composes pages from components that can’t break the layout. No page builder license to renew, ever.
Ecommerce builds
WooCommerce and Shopify stores built around checkout speed and product discovery. Feed-ready structured data, so Google Shopping isn’t an afterthought bolted on by whoever runs your ads.
Web applications & portals
Customer portals, quoting tools, booking systems, dashboards, internal workflow apps. Built in Laravel, Node, or Python depending on what your team can maintain after we hand it over.
Landing pages for paid traffic
Single-purpose pages designed to convert one specific ad group. Fast, testable, and built so a new variant takes hours rather than a sprint.
Speed & Core Web Vitals rescue
You don’t always need a rebuild. Often it’s oversized images, a bloated plugin, and render-blocking scripts. We audit, fix, and show you the before-and-after in Search Console field data.
Migrations & replatforming
Drupal to WordPress, Wix or Squarespace to something you own, legacy PHP to a maintained stack. Redirects mapped properly so you keep the rankings you spent years earning.
Integrations
Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceTitan, QuickBooks, Stripe, whatever runs your business. Two-way where it needs to be, logged so failures are visible instead of silent.
Care plans & maintenance
Updates applied on a staging copy first, offsite backups, uptime monitoring, and a security posture that assumes someone will try. Optional, and not a condition of working with us.
Accessibility remediation
WCAG 2.2 AA work on real markup — contrast, focus order, labels, keyboard traps. Not an overlay widget, which does not make a site accessible and has gotten companies sued.
Stack
We pick the tool that fits, then hand you something maintainable
A framework choice that makes an agency’s life easier and yours harder is a bad choice. Here’s roughly how we decide.
WordPress
The default for marketing sites, and for good reason — your team already knows it, and hiring someone who can maintain it is easy. We build custom block themes, which is what makes it fast.
Laravel & PHP
For applications with real business logic: quoting, scheduling, permissions, billing. Mature, well-documented, and cheap to host on the infrastructure you already pay for.
Node.js & React
Where an interface genuinely needs to feel like an app — live dashboards, complex multi-step forms, real-time updates. We don’t reach for it to render a brochure page.
Angular
Common in enterprise environments with existing Angular teams. If that’s your standard, we’ll work inside it rather than arguing you into a rewrite nobody asked for.
Python & Django
When the project leans on data processing, reporting pipelines, or anything your analytics people will want to extend themselves later.
Shopify & WooCommerce
Shopify when you want the platform to own payments, tax, and PCI scope. WooCommerce when you need control over checkout logic or you’re already deep in WordPress.
Pricing
What a website costs in Chicago, honestly
Nobody publishes this, which makes the whole category feel like buying a car. So here are real ranges. Your quote is fixed before we start, and it doesn’t move unless you change what you asked for — in which case we’ll price the change and you decide.
What actually drives the number: how many unique page templates you need, whether content is migrated or written fresh, how many systems we’re integrating with, and how much custom functionality sits behind the marketing pages.
What doesn’t drive it: how big your company is or what you paid last time. We’ve walked into quotes triple ours and quotes half ours, and neither told us anything about the work involved.
$6,000 – $15,000
Marketing site
Five to fifteen pages, custom design, custom block theme, contact forms, analytics and conversion tracking wired up. Four to seven weeks.
$15,000 – $40,000
Ecommerce or large site
Catalog builds, multi-location or multi-service architecture, content migration from an old CMS, CRM and ERP integrations. Eight to sixteen weeks.
$40,000+
Web application
Custom software with user accounts, permissions, workflows, and business logic. Scoped in phases so you see working software early instead of at the end.
$2,500 – $6,000
Speed & conversion rescue
Keep your current site, fix what’s broken. Core Web Vitals, mobile layout, forms, and the two or three pages that carry your paid traffic. Two to four weeks.
For context, a custom small-business site from a US agency generally runs $8,000–$15,000, and professionally built ecommerce $5,000–$25,000 depending on catalog size and integrations. Anything advertised near $1,000 is a template with your logo dropped into it. Your quote is fixed before we start and only changes if you change the scope.
How a build runs
Five stages, and you see work at every one
No project where you sign off on a wireframe in March and next see the site in July.
01 · DISCOVERY
What it has to do
Who buys from you, what they need to see, what the site must accomplish, and which pages currently carry your traffic so we don’t break them.
02 · DESIGN
Real pages, real content
Designed with your actual copy, not lorem ipsum, at desktop and mobile. Two rounds of revisions built into the price.
03 · BUILD
Coded on staging
You get a staging link from week one and watch it come together. Comment directly on the page rather than emailing screenshots back and forth.
04 · LAUNCH
Nothing gets dropped
Redirect map from every old URL, analytics and conversion tracking verified live, Search Console submitted, and a rollback ready if anything surprises us.
05 · HANDOVER
Trained, not abandoned
A recorded walkthrough for your team, written documentation, all credentials transferred, and thirty days of support included for the questions that come up in week three.
Hiring locally
Choosing web developers in Chicago without getting burned
Chicago has a deep bench — agencies in the West Loop, independent developers scattered across every neighborhood, and offshore shops with a downtown address on the contact page. The quality range is enormous and the pricing tells you almost nothing about where a firm sits in it.
A few questions sort it out quickly. Ask who writes the code and where they sit — not to rule out distributed teams, but because you deserve to know before the first status call. Ask to see a live site they built, then run it through PageSpeed Insights on mobile while you’re on the phone. Ask what happens if you want to leave: whether you get the repository, whether the CMS is something another developer can pick up, and whether any part of it depends on a license only they hold.
That last one catches people. A proprietary page builder or a custom framework only one agency understands is a soft form of lock-in, and you usually don’t discover it until you try to hire someone else. Everything we build runs on open, widely-used tooling. If you fire us tomorrow, any competent WordPress or Laravel developer in this city can pick it up on Monday.
Our office is at 320 W Ohio Street in River North, minutes from the Mart and the Brown Line. We work with clients across Chicagoland — the Loop, West Loop, Fulton Market, Evanston, Naperville, Schaumburg, Oak Brook — and with plenty of companies who’ve never set foot in Illinois. Local is a convenience, not a limitation.
Development FAQs
Questions we get on every project
How long does a custom website take to build?
A standard marketing site runs four to seven weeks from kickoff. Ecommerce and large content migrations run eight to sixteen. The single biggest variable is not us — it’s how quickly content and feedback come back from your side. Projects that slip almost always slip waiting on copy or a decision, so we’ll set those deadlines with you up front and chase them politely.
Will I be able to edit the site myself?
Yes, and that’s a design requirement rather than a bonus. We build pages out of blocks in the standard WordPress editor, so changing a headline, swapping an image, adding a service, or reordering a section is drag-and-drop. You can’t accidentally break the layout, because the components enforce their own spacing and structure. We record a walkthrough for your team and leave written docs in the admin.
Do you host the site, or do we?
You do, in your own account, with your own credit card. We’ll help you pick and configure it, and we’ll work on whatever you already have — GoDaddy, SiteGround, Cloudways, WP Engine, or your own server. Agencies that hold hosting hostage make leaving expensive, and we’d rather you stay because the work is good.
What about SEO — will I lose my rankings?
Not if the migration is done properly. Before anything launches we crawl your existing site, map every URL to its new destination, and put 301 redirects in place. Titles, meta descriptions, headings, and structured data carry over. Traffic usually wobbles for a week or two while Google recrawls, then settles — and often improves, because the new site is faster and better structured than the old one.
Can you work with our existing in-house developer?
Often, yes. We’ve done plenty of projects where we build the front end and an internal team owns the backend, or where we’re brought in for a specific piece. We use Git, we write commit messages a human can read, and we document what we hand over. Tell us early how your team wants to work and we’ll fit into it.
Do you use page builders like Elementor or Divi?
No. They’re genuinely convenient for the person building the site, and they cost your visitors 150–250KB of CSS and JavaScript before a single word of your content loads. On mobile that’s the difference between a PageSpeed score in the seventies and one in the nineties. If you already have an Elementor site we’re happy to maintain it — we just won’t start a new project on one.
What happens after launch?
Thirty days of support is included — that’s when the real questions surface. After that you can take a care plan for updates, backups, monitoring, and a monthly block of change hours, or you can take the keys and run it yourself. Plenty of clients do the latter, and we’re fine with it.
Free, no strings
Find out what your account is actually costing you
Send us your Google Ads account or your website — whichever one is leaking more money — and we’ll come back with a short, specific list: what we’d change, in what order, and what we think it’s worth. No slide deck, no discovery call required to get it.
If we look at it and think you’re already in good hands, we’ll tell you that instead. We’d rather lose a pitch than take on work we can’t move the needle on.
- A written breakdown of wasted spend, with the search terms that caused it
- Your real cost per qualified lead — not per form fill
- Which landing pages are killing your conversion rate, and why
- Core Web Vitals and mobile speed scored against your top competitors
- A prioritized fix list you can hand to anyone — including your current agency
Turnaround is usually two to three business days. We’re at 320 W Ohio St in River North if you’d rather do it in person.