Website Development

High-performance websites engineered for speed, search visibility, and conversion. Built from scratch to outperform WordPress on every metric that matters.

100 Lighthouse Score Target
<1s First Contentful Paint
<100ms Time to Interactive

Why Performance Isn't Optional Anymore

Your website is evaluated every second—by users, by Google's algorithms, and increasingly, by AI systems that decide whether to recommend you. In 2025, a slow website isn't just annoying. It's invisible.

We build custom websites that are engineered for the modern web: fast, SEO-optimized, and structured for both traditional search engines and AI answer engines. Every line of code is written with performance, accessibility, and discoverability in mind.

How Your Website Is Actually Evaluated

Most businesses don't realize their website is being judged by three different systems—each with different priorities.

Google Search Indexing

Traditional SEO

Google's crawlers evaluate your site using 200+ ranking factors. The most critical ones:

  • Core Web Vitals: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
  • Mobile-First Indexing: Your mobile experience is your ranking
  • Structured Data: Schema markup that tells Google what your content means
  • Page Experience Signals: HTTPS, safe browsing, no intrusive interstitials
  • Content Quality: E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)
WordPress avg. Lighthouse score: 45-65
Our custom builds: 95-100

AI Answer Engines

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google SGE, and Bing Copilot are rewriting search. They evaluate:

  • Semantic Structure: Clear headings, logical content hierarchy, contextual relationships
  • Factual Accuracy: Verifiable claims, citations, authoritative sources
  • Content Completeness: Comprehensive answers that address user intent
  • Scannability: Bullet points, tables, clear sections AI can parse
  • Freshness: Updated content with timestamps and revision dates
Key Difference: AI doesn't care about keyword density. It cares about meaning, structure, and trustworthiness.

Lighthouse Audits

Google's Quality Standard

Lighthouse is Google's automated website auditing tool. It measures four critical categories:

  • Performance (0-100): Speed metrics, resource optimization, render blocking
  • Accessibility (0-100): ARIA labels, contrast ratios, keyboard navigation, screen readers
  • Best Practices (0-100): Security, modern standards, browser compatibility
  • SEO (0-100): Meta tags, crawlability, mobile-friendliness, structured data
Perfect score: 400/400

This isn't theoretical. Lighthouse scores directly impact your Google ranking, especially on mobile.

Custom Build vs. WordPress: The Real Numbers

WordPress powers 43% of the web. But it wasn't designed for 2025's performance standards. Here's what you're giving up.

Metric
WordPress (Typical)
MAANTIS Custom Build
Page Load Time First Contentful Paint
2.5-4.5s Plugin overhead, bloated themes
<0.8s Static generation, zero bloat
Time to Interactive When users can actually click
3.8-6.2s jQuery, 15+ JS files
<1.5s Minimal JS, optimized delivery
Lighthouse Performance Google's speed score
45-65/100 Database queries, plugin conflicts
95-100/100 Pre-rendered, edge cached
Total Page Size Data downloaded per visit
2.5-4MB Unused CSS/JS, unoptimized images
<500KB Tree-shaken, compressed, WebP
Security Vulnerabilities Attack surface
High Risk 43% of hacked sites are WordPress
Minimal Surface No database, no PHP, no plugins
Hosting Requirements Server complexity
Complex PHP, MySQL, caching layers
Simple CDN Static files, global edge network
Maintenance Overhead Time spent on updates
Weekly Core, plugins, themes, security patches
Quarterly Content updates, feature additions

Why the difference?

WordPress was built in 2003 to power blogs. It's a PHP application that generates HTML on every page request by querying a database. Even with caching, you're still running server-side code, loading dozens of plugins, and parsing thousands of lines of unused CSS/JS.

Our custom builds are static-first. We generate your entire site at build time, deploy it to a global CDN, and serve pre-rendered HTML in milliseconds. No database queries. No PHP execution. No plugin conflicts. Just pure performance.

SEO: Visibility Is Engineering

Search engine optimization isn't about tricks or hacks. It's about building websites the way search engines expect—technically sound, semantically structured, and blazing fast.

Technical SEO

The foundation that determines if you can even compete.

  • Crawlability: Clean URLs, XML sitemaps, robots.txt configuration
  • Indexability: Canonical tags, proper redirects, no duplicate content
  • Site Architecture: Logical hierarchy, internal linking, breadcrumbs
  • Performance: Core Web Vitals, mobile-first, HTTPS
  • Structured Data: JSON-LD schema for rich snippets

On-Page Optimization

Every page is a landing page. We optimize accordingly.

  • Title Tags: Unique, descriptive, keyword-optimized (50-60 chars)
  • Meta Descriptions: Compelling summaries that drive clicks (150-160 chars)
  • Header Hierarchy: Single H1, logical H2-H6 structure
  • Image Optimization: Alt text, responsive images, WebP format, lazy loading
  • Content Structure: Semantic HTML5, clear sections, scannable formatting

Content Strategy

Search engines reward depth, clarity, and expertise.

  • User Intent Matching: Answer the actual question being asked
  • E-E-A-T Signals: Author bios, citations, industry credentials
  • Comprehensive Coverage: Topic clusters, pillar content, supporting articles
  • Freshness: Regular updates, publish dates, content versioning
  • Internal Linking: Contextual links, topic relationships, authority flow

AEO: The Next Frontier

Optimizing for AI-powered answer engines requires different thinking.

  • Clear Answers First: Put the answer in the first paragraph
  • Question-Based Headers: "What is X?", "How does Y work?"
  • Structured Lists: Tables, bullet points, step-by-step guides
  • Contextual Definitions: Explain technical terms inline
  • Comparison Content: "X vs Y" formats AI systems love to cite
  • Statistical Evidence: Numbers, data, measurable claims

When ChatGPT or Perplexity cites a source, it's pulling from sites with clear structure, factual content, and comprehensive answers. We build for that.

Core Web Vitals: The Metrics That Matter

Since 2021, Google's Core Web Vitals are a direct ranking factor. These three metrics measure real user experience.

LCP

Largest Contentful Paint
Target: <2.5s We hit: <1.2s

Measures when the largest content element (image, video, text block) becomes visible. This is what users perceive as "the page has loaded."

How we optimize:

  • Pre-compressed images (WebP, AVIF)
  • Above-the-fold priority loading
  • Critical CSS inlined, fonts preloaded
  • Static generation eliminates server processing

FID / INP

First Input Delay / Interaction to Next Paint
Target: <100ms We hit: <50ms

Measures how quickly your site responds to user interactions (clicks, taps, key presses). Google replaced FID with INP in 2024 for more comprehensive interactivity measurement.

How we optimize:

  • Minimal JavaScript (only what's needed)
  • No render-blocking scripts
  • Event handlers optimized with debouncing
  • Lazy loading for non-critical interactions

CLS

Cumulative Layout Shift
Target: <0.1 We hit: <0.05

Measures unexpected layout shifts—when elements move as the page loads. You know that frustrating moment when you're about to click and the page jumps? That's CLS.

How we optimize:

  • Reserved space for images/embeds with aspect-ratio
  • Font loading strategies (font-display: swap)
  • No dynamic content injection above the fold
  • Proper sizing for ads and iframes

The Business Impact

53% of mobile users abandon sites that take >3s to load
1s delay = 7% reduction in conversions (Amazon data)
+15% increase in page views from improving Core Web Vitals (Google case study)

What We Build

Marketing & Brand Sites

High-conversion landing pages, brand showcases, and lead generation engines built for speed and SEO.

  • Custom design systems
  • A/B testing infrastructure
  • Analytics and conversion tracking
  • CMS integration (Sanity, Contentful, Obsidian)

E-Commerce Platforms

Fast, secure online stores optimized for conversion and search visibility.

  • Headless commerce (Shopify, Commerce.js)
  • Custom checkout flows
  • Product schema markup for rich snippets
  • Performance-optimized product images

SaaS & Web Applications

Complex web applications with login systems, dashboards, and real-time features.

  • Authentication & authorization
  • Database design and optimization
  • API development (REST, GraphQL, tRPC)
  • Admin panels and analytics dashboards

Documentation Sites

Technical documentation and knowledge bases optimized for both human readers and AI citation.

  • Search-optimized structure
  • Version control and change tracking
  • Code syntax highlighting
  • API reference generation

Our Technology Stack

We choose tools based on performance, maintainability, and long-term viability—not trends.

Static Site Generators

Astro Next.js Remix

Framework-agnostic, island architecture, zero JS by default

Frontend Frameworks

React Svelte Vue

When interactivity is needed, we choose the right tool for the job

Styling

Tailwind CSS CSS Modules Vanilla CSS

Optimized for minimal bundle size and maintainability

Headless CMS

Sanity Contentful Obsidian MDX

Content management without WordPress overhead

Deployment

Vercel Netlify Cloudflare Pages AWS Amplify

Global CDN, instant deploys, automatic HTTPS

Performance Tools

Lighthouse CI WebPageTest Bundle Analyzer Chrome DevTools

Continuous performance monitoring and optimization

Ready to Build a Website That Performs?

Let's talk about your project. We'll show you exactly how we'll achieve 95+ Lighthouse scores and top-tier search visibility.

Get In Touch
Call 212-814-8366