"What Will You Build It In?"
It's a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than a list of logos. The technology choice determines what your site costs to run, how quickly it can be changed, who can change it, and whether you're stuck with us in two years. Those are business questions wearing technical clothing.
Most of our work is built with React and Next.js. Here's the honest reasoning — including the parts that count against them, and the projects where we recommend something else entirely.
What React Actually Gives You
React's core idea is that an interface is built from components — self-contained pieces like a booking form, a pricing card, a navigation bar — that you define once and reuse everywhere.
The commercial consequence matters more than the technical one. When your brand colour changes, or a legal disclaimer needs adding to every quote form, it's one edit rather than forty. On a site of any real size, that difference compounds across every change you'll ever request. It's also why later phases of a project tend to cost less per feature than the first — the pieces already exist.
The second benefit is hiring. React is the most widely used interface library in the industry, which means your project isn't dependent on a niche skill set. If you ever part ways with us, you can find someone to pick it up. We think that's a point in a studio's favour, not against it.
What Next.js Adds
React alone has a well-known weakness: done naively, the browser downloads an empty page and then a large bundle of JavaScript that draws the content. That's slow on a mid-range phone, and historically it was bad for search engines.
Next.js fixes this by rendering pages on the server or building them ahead of time, so the visitor receives real HTML immediately. Practically, that gives you:
- Pages that are indexable and shareable – real content in the HTML, correct meta tags, working link previews.
- Fast first paint – content appears without waiting on a JavaScript download, which is what Core Web Vitals actually measure.
- Image handling that works by default – correct sizes and modern formats served automatically, which is one of the biggest wins available on most sites.
- A backend when you need one – form handling, payment webhooks and API routes live in the same project instead of a separate service.
That last point is underrated for smaller projects. One codebase, one deployment, one thing to maintain.
The Costs Nobody Mentions
Every stack has a bill attached. Ours has these:
- Content editing needs a plan. Out of the box, changing text means changing code. We pair Next.js with a headless CMS so your team can edit without a developer — but that's a deliberate decision with its own cost, not something you get for free.
- Hosting is not a £5 shared plan. It needs a platform that runs Node.js. Still inexpensive, but different from traditional web hosting.
- The ecosystem moves fast. A project left untouched for three years will need real work to update. Budget for maintenance, or accept that a rebuild arrives sooner.
- It's genuine engineering. There's no plugin marketplace where a feature can be bought for $49. Custom work is more flexible and costs more.
When We Recommend Something Else
We'd rather talk you out of a stack than sell you one you don't need.
WordPress is still the right answer for a content-led site where non-technical staff publish frequently, where the budget is tight, and where the required features map cleanly onto mature plugins. A well-built WordPress site beats a badly-built React one every time. The trade-off is plugin sprawl, ongoing security patching, and performance that needs active management.
Shopify wins for straightforward retail. Payments, tax, shipping rules and fraud handling are solved problems, and rebuilding them custom is rarely money well spent. We'd reach for a custom front end only when the storefront experience is genuinely unusual.
Plain HTML and CSS — like the site you're reading — is perfectly respectable for a handful of pages that change rarely. It's fast, cheap to host, and there is nothing to keep patched. Reaching for a framework here would be showing off at the client's expense.
The Questions Worth Asking Any Developer
Whoever you end up working with, these four answers tell you most of what you need to know:
- Who owns the code, and where does it live? The correct answer is you, in a repository you can access.
- How do we edit content without calling you? If there's no good answer, you've bought a dependency.
- What does hosting cost per month, and what happens at ten times the traffic?
- What does year two look like? Updates, security patches and small changes — priced, not vague.
A studio that answers these plainly is one you can plan around. The stack matters far less than whether the people building it will tell you the truth about it.
Weighing up how to build your next project? Talk to us — we'll give you a straight recommendation, including when it isn't us.