Web Development Best Practices

Build for the person maintaining it in a year

Most best-practice lists are written by developers impressing other developers. This one's for business websites, where the real test of good development isn't elegance, it's whether the site is still fast, findable and fixable a year in, when someone who isn't the original builder has to change something. Every habit below serves that test.

Set a performance budget and defend it

Decide what the page is allowed to weigh and how fast it must load on a mid-range phone over mobile data, then hold every addition to it. Budgets turn "can we add this?" into "what's it worth?", which is the right question. The usual culprits are predictable: oversized images, fonts nobody is using, and script after script added for one feature and never removed. Speed is lost by a thousand small yeses.

Write HTML that means something

Semantic markup, real headings in order, buttons that are buttons, links that are links, isn't pedantry. It's how search engines parse the page, how screen readers present it, and how the next developer understands it. A div-soup site can look identical and be worse at all three. The cheapest SEO and accessibility work happens at build time, in the markup, for free.

Accessibility is a build decision

Contrast checked, focus states visible, forms labelled, images described, keyboard navigation working. Retrofitting this after launch costs multiples of doing it during, and the audience it serves is bigger than most clients guess, including every customer with ageing eyes and a small screen in bright sun.

Choose boring, maintainable technology

The stack question has one honest answer for most business sites: whatever the team looking after it can keep looking after. Chasing the framework of the month builds a site only its author can service. We build on Webflow for reasons we've written up, and the biggest of them is maintenance, sites that don't rot the moment attention moves elsewhere. Custom code has its place, for the parts that earn it, wired in carefully rather than sprayed everywhere.

Test where your users are

On a real phone, a few years old, over mobile data, with a thumb. The site was probably built on a fast machine and a big screen, and the customers are on neither. Half of what this test surfaces never appears in a desktop preview: tap targets too small, layouts that crush, forms that fight the keyboard.

None of these habits photograph well. Collectively they're the difference between a site that quietly compounds, faster, higher-ranked, cheap to change, and one that gets rebuilt from scratch every three years because nobody can bear to touch it.