The article
Your site is live, or a developer has sent you an estimate, and something feels wrong: the site is slow on a phone, Google barely shows it, the project is months late, or the quote is twice what you expected. You need someone who builds sites to look at yours and tell you what to fix first: that is what web development consulting is for.
I have been building software for 18 years. Since 2017 my team of 70+ specialists has delivered 150+ web development and software projects, and clients rate us 5.0 on Clutch from 26 verified reviews (as of September 2026), none of them negative.
The short version
| What | How it works |
|---|---|
| For whom | You have a site, an estimate or a stalled project and want an expert view |
| What you get | What is wrong, what to fix first, what to keep, and whether a rebuild is worth it |
| Price | The first call and the rough estimate are free; the audit is priced in a contract before it starts |
| After that | You fix it with your developer, another team or us |
Four jobs a web development consultation does
- An audit of a live site. It is slow, brings few leads, or nobody can say what it runs on. We check speed and Core Web Vitals, SEO basics, accessibility, security and who owns what.
- A second opinion on an estimate or a stack. We tell you what is missing, what we would ask the developer and how we would build it.
- A rescue plan for a stalled project. We read what exists and tell you what finishing it would take, or whether starting over costs less.
- A roadmap before you build. Requirements in writing, the frameworks, database and hosting that fit, and what to build first.
Check your site in 15 minutes
I would run these checks on any site before paying a web development consultancy for an audit, us included.
| Check | How | If it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Core Web Vitals | PageSpeed Insights, real-user data: good is LCP up to 2.5 s, INP up to 200 ms, CLS up to 0.1 | Visitors leave before the page loads |
| Image sizes | Browser DevTools at phone width, Network tab: the heaviest pictures | A phone downloads pictures made for a wide monitor |
| Lazy loading | Same tab, reload without scrolling: pictures far below should not load yet | A slower first screen |
| Link previews | Paste a page address into LinkedIn Post Inspector | A shared link is a bare line, not a card |
| Image descriptions | Lighthouse, Accessibility: images without alt text | Screen readers and Google cannot tell what a picture shows |
| Contact form | Send yourself a message through it | Leads disappear without a sound |
| Uptime | Ask who notices first if the site goes down on a Saturday night | You hear about it from a client |
| Domain | WHOIS or RDAP, or your registrar account: whose name, and when it expires | Whoever holds the domain holds your address and your email |
| Analytics | Google Analytics, Admin, Account access management: you are an Administrator; in Search Console, an owner | Change developers, and years of data stay behind |
| Code | A contract clause on code ownership, and a repository you can open | Every change goes through the old developer, at their price |
In October 2026 I ran two of these checks on four web development pages Google shows for this search: two have no link preview picture, and two serve every picture in one size, whatever the screen. A small sample, but a reason to check yours.
An audit by a web consulting company spends its time on what you cannot see from outside: how the code is written, whether the platform still gets updates, whether backups work and who has admin access.
What you get
A report that says:
- what is wrong, starting with what costs you visitors and leads;
- what to fix first and what can wait;
- what to keep, so a fix does not throw away what works;
- whether a rebuild is worth it, and why.
If you want us to do the work, the rough estimate for it is free. Need this judgment every week, not once? A CTO from our team can join yours through staff augmentation.
How it goes
- A free first call. If you need an NDA, we sign it before you share details. On weekdays from 9 am to 6 pm Eastern time, we reply within 30 minutes.
- Read access to the code repository, the hosting, the domain registrar, Google Analytics and Search Console. If you cannot get one of them, that is the first finding.
- A contract that says what we check and what it costs, before any work starts.
- The audit. We read the code and the hosting, measure the pages and write down what we find.
- Your decision: fix, rebuild or leave it. More on how our projects start.
What web development consulting costs
The first call and the rough estimate are free; the audit is priced in the contract. If the answer is a new site, compare with our published starting prices: a website from $499 plus $29 a month, billed annually ($348), for hosting and support, or a web application from $5,000. All our starting prices are on the pricing page.
Fix or rebuild
Fix it when the code, the domain and the accounts are yours, the platform still gets updates, and the problems are local: heavy pictures, a slow plugin, a weak hosting plan, missing page titles.
Speed is often a fix. An earlier version of our own build for Build Wise Investments scored 77 and 74 in Lighthouse on a phone: a loader counted as the largest paint, and the hero pulled a 3840 px picture. The loader left the critical path, the styles were inlined and the phone's first download was cut in half. The site now scores 100 in all four categories, with no rebuild.
Rebuild it when:
- you cannot get the code, or it runs on a platform nobody updates;
- every small change takes days, and the fix list touches most pages;
- the site does not work on a phone, and the content needs a new structure;
- fixing a small site costs more than a new one: ours, up to 20 pages, starts at $499.
An application with accounts and integrations is web application development; a design no one else has, a custom website. For a site built elsewhere, website maintenance starts with a look at it: if it fits, we move it to us and rebuild it with AI for the price of the plan. Deeper checks are services of their own: a security audit and ADA website compliance against WCAG 2.1 AA.
