Website Design

Website Design Built for Search and Speed

Website design for ecommerce brands and local businesses, with the URL structure, schema, speed and accessibility planned before the first mockup. Design happens inside a monthly SEO retainer, with no build fee. We deliver sales, not just rankings.

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What Is SEO-First Website Design?

SEO-first website design means planning the URL structure, page templates, schema and speed budget before anyone picks colors, so the site can compete in search the week it launches. Schema is code that tells search engines what a page is about, such as your hours, prices or service area. We do this work first. Fixing structure after launch means rebuilding templates.

Design the phone version first. In November 2023, 81.5% of Americans aged 15 and older used a mobile phone, while only 22.4% used a desktop computer, down from 36.7% in July 2015, according to NTIA Internet Use Survey data (2024). Your customers judge you on a small screen.

Problems We Fix in the Design Phase

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Five-page sites with a phone number and no pages for the services or cities people search

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City pages that could be about any town once you cover up its name

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Hero images set to lazy-load, so the main content shows up last

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Images without set dimensions that make the page jump while it loads

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Contact forms whose fields are labeled only by placeholder text

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Templates that drop schema, so search engines can’t tell what each page is

We Research the Structure Before We Design

Before we design a site, we pull the real search results for its market and study what earns traffic for the businesses already ranking there. For a trade site, that means the top pages of three ranking contractors at different authority levels. We study contractors, never agencies. In our HVAC pull on July 20, 2026, a contractor with a Domain Rating of 28 (Ahrefs’ 0-100 score for link strength) got the most non-brand traffic from a /{trade}/{service}/ page. The structure worked without big authority. Across the contractors, service and city pages carried the most traffic. Homepages carried far less.

So a trade site we design uses /{trade}/{service}/ as its spine. It adds service-area pages only for cities the business genuinely serves, and it carries one LocalBusiness schema that lists each served city. Most HVAC websites are five pages and a phone number. That structure can’t compete for city searches.

Every City Page Has to Pass the Thumb Test

Every city page we build has to pass the thumb test. Cover the town name. If the page could be about anywhere, it’s a doorway page, the kind of page Google’s spam policies (2026) call doorway abuse. We adopted the test and built tooling to score it. Then we ran it on the 36 city pages across our own demo sites. Every one failed. We changed our build process so new city pages have to pass, and we’re rebuilding the demo pages to match.

See a Demo Before You Commit

We build fictional demo sites for home-services trades, each with two design directions on identical URLs, so an owner can click through the structure before committing to anything. Six were live by late July 2026. If we’ve built one for your trade, we’ll walk you through it on the call.

Speed and Accessibility Are Design Decisions

Speed and accessibility get decided by design choices: which image loads first, whether images have fixed sizes, the color palette and how form fields are labeled. Each is cheaper to get right in the mockup. Most sites get at least one wrong.

On large ecommerce category pages, the most common speed defect we find is the hero image or first product tile set to lazy-load. Lazy-loading tells the browser to fetch that image late, even though it’s the biggest thing on screen. Across the web, about 16-17% of pages lazy-load the image that is their Largest Contentful Paint element, the largest image or text block Google times as the page loads, per HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac. And 62% of mobile pages leave at least one image without set dimensions. The Almanac calls that “one of the most persistent and preventable contributors” to layout shift. Both are template fixes.

Accessibility fails the same way. Only 31% of mobile sites met minimum color-contrast requirements in 2025, and 55% of form inputs on mobile pages relied on placeholder text alone for their name, per the same Almanac. Placeholder text vanishes once someone starts typing. We set contrast in the palette, put a real label on every form field and keep visible focus outlines for keyboard users.

Schema is the same story. Only 50% of home pages carried any structured data in 2025, the Almanac found. We build schema into the templates, so every new page ships with it.

How Website Design Works Inside a Retainer

Website design at Matcha Growth happens inside a monthly retainer with a minimum term. There’s no separate build fee or setup fee. The design and build happen early in the term, and the SEO work continues in the same retainer after launch. Measurement starts on launch day.

Research

You see what earns traffic in your market before anything is designed. Nothing is guessed. We pull live search results and the top pages of businesses already ranking, then map the pages your site needs.

Structure

You approve a URL map, page templates and a schema plan. You sign off first. City or service-area pages only go on the map for places you genuinely serve, and each one has to pass the thumb test.

Design & Build

Phones come first. We build on WordPress by default. The main image loads first, images have set sizes, contrast is readable and forms are labeled. Existing URLs that earn traffic keep their addresses wherever possible.

Launch QA

We compare Chrome’s real-user speed data with a throttled mobile test and fix what both confirm. We check every edit against the origin server, past the host’s page cache. The sitemap gets checked too.

That QA list comes from our own sites. On one of our WordPress sites, the Rank Math sitemap kept its 2022-2024 last-modified dates after we updated 197 posts through the API. A stale date removes a freshness signal, which can slow how fast Google recrawls the updated posts. The documented fix is to re-save the sitemap settings, which regenerates it. We also audit our own site every week with the same scripts we run for clients.

What Every Build Ships With

Structure From Search Data

A URL map built from what ranks in your market, approved before the first template is designed.

Schema in the Templates

LocalBusiness, Product, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage markup built into the theme, so new pages ship with it.

Phone-First Speed

The main image loads first, every image has set dimensions, and scripts that block the page are deferred.

Accessible by Default

Contrast set in the palette, real labels on form fields and visible focus outlines for keyboard users.

Tracking Before Launch

Search Console and GA4 connected before the site goes live, so the first week of traffic gets measured.

SEO After Launch

The same retainer carries the SEO work forward, so the site keeps getting tested after it goes live.

We Build and Sell Our Own Websites

Matcha Growth’s founder, Colin Ma, has built websites, ranked them and sold them. In 2020 he sold two affiliate sites for six figures each. One was a tech site he built from scratch, earning about $4,500 a month, which sold for $120,000, as he told Niche Pursuits (2021). Owning the P&L changed how we plan. Every page we propose has to earn search demand that can turn into revenue. The fractional CMO of an 8-9 figure pet brand told us he hired us because Colin had built and exited his own sites: “you put your money where your mouth is.” His results are on our ecommerce SEO page.

Our own WordPress sites run on WPX hosting (an affiliate link; we earn a commission if you sign up). Running them taught us that a host’s page cache can serve stale HTML after an edit. Now we check edits past the cache.

Website Design FAQs

Do you charge a separate fee to build the website?

We don’t charge a separate fee to build the website. Design and build happen inside a monthly retainer with a minimum term, and there’s no setup fee either. The SEO work continues in the same retainer after launch. We set scope and the minimum term on a strategy call, since both depend on the size of the site.

Which platform will you build on?

We build on WordPress by default, because our own sites run on it and we know where it breaks. Our trade demo sites use Next.js. If your store already runs on Shopify, talk to us before commissioning a redesign. The bigger gains there are often structure, collection copy and product data, and a new theme may not be needed.

Will a redesign hurt our rankings?

A redesign can hurt rankings when it changes URLs, drops pages that earn traffic or strips schema. We keep the URLs, titles, headings and schema that already earn traffic, and 301-redirect any address that has to change. After launch we watch Search Console for pages that lose ground. No one can promise rankings won’t move.

How can we judge the site structure before you build it?

You can judge the site structure before we build because it’s modeled on what already ranks in your market. We pull live search results and the top pages of ranking competitors at different authority levels. Then you see the URL map. For home-services trades, we can also walk you through a demo site with the same structure.

Do you design websites for accessibility?

We design websites for accessibility from the first mockup. That means color contrast set in the palette, a real label on every form field, visible focus outlines and image alt text that describes the image. HTTP Archive’s data shows how often sites miss them. We don’t certify legal compliance.

Related Services

Website design is one of our growth services. These pages run alongside it.

Ready to Rebuild?

Book a 30-minute call. We’ll walk through your current site, your top pages by traffic, and what a rebuild would look like for your platform.