Sites built to convert & rank
Webflow, Next.js, Astro, Shopify — picked for the job, not the trend. Core Web Vitals budgeted in CI. WCAG 2.2 AA by default. Schema baked in, not bolted on. Migration plans with the redirect map written before the build starts.
The conventional wisdom is that you pick a platform first and then figure out SEO afterwards. The conventional wisdom is exactly backwards. We pick the platform that fits the editorial team, the commercial model, and the ranking ambition — in that order — and then write the redirect map before any code ships. We have shipped 47 sites in the last two years on the four stacks that pay rent in Utah and we are not loyal to any of them.
Web Development at Utah SEO Specialists is what happens when the engineering team and the SEO team work for the same company. Most Utah businesses we audit are running a site built two to four years ago by a dev shop that handed it off with a clean Lighthouse score and zero structured data — and an SEO retainer at a different agency that has been making the most of what the site allows. Both halves of that pairing leave performance on the table. A site rebuild is a search opportunity disguised as a design project, and we treat it that way from the kickoff call.
Core Web Vitals are now a real ranking signal — not a tiebreaker. The 2024 algorithm update and its followups elevated INP (Interaction to Next Paint) to the third tracked metric and meaningfully widened the gap between "passes" and "fails" in commercial SERPs. We budget the vitals in CI on every shipped build: <1.2 s is the median we deliver on mobile slow-4G across the portfolio. Lighthouse Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO hold at 100 on every build — Performance we treat as a budget, not a pin, because real-world data from CrUX is what actually shifts ranking.
Platform fit is the question we get most often and the one most agencies answer dishonestly. Webflow is the right answer when your team wants editorial control and your content velocity is moderate. Next.js or Astro is the right answer when you need custom application logic, headless content, or the absolute fastest delivery. Shopify Plus is the right answer when commerce is the primary surface. WordPress is the right answer when you have a deep editorial team that already operates in it and the migration cost is real. Ezra Lindquist picks per project. We are not loyal to a stack; we are loyal to the outcome.
Accessibility is now a defensive requirement. WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard we ship to by default, not as an upgrade tier. ADA demand letters now arrive monthly for Utah small businesses — settlement costs run $15k–$50k and the remediation cost dwarfs the original "save money on accessibility" decision. Halle handles the AAA audits on healthcare and legal projects where the compliance bar is higher. The honest answer about timeline: a mid-size marketing site rebuilds in 6 wk; larger commerce or application builds run 10–14 weeks. Anyone promising a quarterly enterprise build in three weeks is selling a template, not a site.
3 metrics
The 2024 algorithm update elevated INP to the third tracked metric (replacing FID) and meaningfully widened the gap between "passes" and "fails" in commercial SERPs. CrUX field data is now what Google reads — not Lighthouse synthetic. Sites that pass with margin out-rank sites that pass narrowly. The work is engineering, not optimization theatre.
Source: Google Search Central + Chrome UX Report, March 2024 update onward
$15-50k
Letters now arrive monthly across the SMB segment — the plaintiff bar industrialized the pipeline in 2024. WCAG 2.2 AA at the build stage costs a fraction of post-letter remediation. We ship to AA by default on every build; AAA when the category (healthcare, legal, government) requires it.
Source: Seyfarth ADA Title III tracker, 2024-2025 annual reports
47 sites
Spread across Webflow, Next.js, Astro, Shopify, and a small number of WordPress maintenance carriers. The pattern that holds is the platform fit decision matters more than the stack religion — we pick per project, not per agency preference.
Source: USH engineering portfolio, 2024-01-01 → 2026-04-30
Current site put under the same instrumentation we hold our own builds to — CrUX field data pull, Lighthouse across the top 30 URLs, axe-core accessibility scan, and a WCAG 2.2 AA gap report. The audit ships in week one and is what the platform-fit decision in play 02 is based on.
Honest answer about which stack fits your editorial team, your commercial model, and your ranking ambition. Includes a TCO comparison, an editorial-velocity score, and a five-year migration-cost projection. The deliverable is a one-page recommendation, not a slide deck.
The 301 map is written before any code ships — every legacy URL accounted for, every canonical resolved, every redirect chain flattened. Theo reviews the map against the current organic top-100 to ensure no ranking page is silently dropped. This is the single highest-leverage step in any rebuild and the one most agencies treat as a punchlist item.
Standard cadence is weekly demo plus shared Linear. Design system tokens defined first, components built once, pages composed from components. CMS structured so the editorial team can actually use it without us in the loop. No template surprises in week five.
Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article, Product, Review, BreadcrumbList — emitted at build time, validated in CI, and shaped to the patterns Google and the LLMs actually reward in 2026. Stripped of the bloat that was popular two years ago. Theo specs; Ezra ships.
Lighthouse Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO budgeted at 100 — a failed score blocks deploy. Performance budgeted on LCP, INP, CLS, and total bundle size — regressions show up in pull requests, not in production. The budget travels with the codebase, not in a notion doc.
Frameworks deprecate features. Webflow ships breaking changes. Shopify themes accumulate cruft. Every quarter the site gets a 30-minute Ezra review — dependency update plan, schema validation, redirect map check, CrUX trend — so the build that launched at LCP 1.1s does not silently slide to 2.4s eighteen months later.
“Six months in, we're ranking #1 for the terms that pay our bills. Worth ten of what we used to spend on Yelp ads.”
“We stopped buying ads against our own name in November, and the phone kept ringing. That was the moment I knew the work was real.”
“The dashboard alone is worth the retainer. We can finally tell our board where every dollar — and every citation — went.”
8ENGINES, ONE DASHBOARD
Web Development is project-based at Foundation, available as a paired discipline at Growth, and embedded as a standing engineering engagement at Command. Project pricing is fixed-bid against scope; retainers cover ongoing engineering and the quarterly stack-drift reviews.
Single site build or rebuild. Fixed-bid project, audit included, schema baked in.
$2,400/month
Starting · 3-month min
Project + ongoing engineering retainer. Quarterly check-ins. Where most clients land.
$6,800/month
Most popular
Embedded engineering — Ezra on the account, weekly cadence, schema and migrations on standing call.
$14,500/month
For ambitious mandates
The questions Ezra and Theo answer most weeks. If yours is different, the call is twenty minutes and the answer is honest.
Yes, when WordPress is the right answer — which is when you have a deep editorial team already operating in it and the migration cost is real. We are not WordPress-allergic and we are not WordPress-loyal. Ezra Lindquist and the engineering team are comfortable on the full ecosystem (custom blocks, ACF, classic + block editors, headless WP through WPGraphQL) and will tell you honestly when you should leave it.
Webflow if your editorial team wants visual control, your content velocity is moderate, and your application logic is form-and-CMS shaped. Next.js (or Astro) if you need custom application logic, headless content, the absolute fastest delivery, or a developer team that owns the stack. The wrong direction is to pick the platform first and force-fit the team to it. We will tell you which way to lean inside the platform-fit audit in week one.
Shopify Plus is the right answer when commerce is the primary surface — DTC, multi-storefront, or B2B with self-serve checkout. We ship on Plus, work in Liquid and Hydrogen depending on the team, and have a small bench of theme-engineering specialists. We will not move you to Shopify because the agency next door is a Shopify shop; we will move you to Shopify when the commerce model justifies it.
Yes, with one rule that we will not bend: the redirect map is written before any code ships. Every legacy URL accounted for, every canonical resolved, every redirect chain flattened. Theo reviews the map against the current organic top-100 to ensure no ranking page is silently dropped. The two-week dip you read about in case studies is almost always a missing redirect map, not an algorithm event.
You do. On the platform that makes sense — Vercel for Next.js, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages for Astro, Webflow's native hosting for Webflow, Shopify's for Shopify, your existing managed WordPress host for WordPress. Hosting fees go direct to the vendor at vendor pricing. We do not resell hosting. We do help you pick the tier that matches your traffic and we run the DNS migration with you on the call.
That is the design constraint. The CMS is structured so editors can publish, edit, and reshape the marketing surface without an engineer in the loop — and so that the engineer-only surfaces are clearly separated. Marisol Quiñones sits in on the content-model design so the editorial team's actual workflow shapes the CMS, not the other way around. If your editors hate the new CMS, we have failed.
A mid-size marketing site (8–20 routes) rebuilds in 6 wk from kickoff to launch. Larger commerce or application builds run 10–14 weeks. Healthcare or legal builds that need WCAG 2.2 AAA add a week for the accessibility deep-audit. Anyone promising a quarterly enterprise build in three weeks is selling a template, not a site.
Ezra runs a 20-minute review of the current site — performance, accessibility, schema posture, and whether a rebuild or a targeted intervention is the right call — and tells you straight. The call is twenty minutes and the answer is honest.
Prefer email? hello@utahseospecialists.com
Free of charge. No pitch. Utah hours, Monday to Thursday, Mountain time.