A code-first website for organisations that outgrow WordPress, Wix or Squarespace. A fully custom design system, headless CMS of your choice, server-side rendering and native multi-language support. Built for enterprises, SaaS companies, publishers and government.
WordPress powers roughly 43% of the internet and is a sound choice for most small and mid-sized sites. Wix, Squarespace and Webflow are similar: drag-and-drop platforms that deliver results quickly within fixed boundaries. For many organisations, those boundaries are perfectly adequate.
But not for everyone. We build custom website development when a standard CMS can no longer handle scale, performance, accessibility or content architecture. Think of an enterprise corporate site spanning several divisions, a SaaS company that wants its marketing website and product app to connect seamlessly, a university with multi-faculty content, a government body that must follow WCAG and BIO strictly, or a publisher with daily content volumes that a standard CMS cannot cope with.
Custom means we start from your requirements, not from the limitations of an existing platform. Code-first, with a headless CMS for your editors and a dedicated frontend that does exactly what your brand and technology require.
We have been building custom websites since 2015 for a wide range of clients, from industrial groups and SaaS companies to publishers, ministries and international agencies that build white-label client websites. What they share is that an off-the-shelf CMS no longer fits them, and they want back control over performance, accessibility, content architecture and integrations. For clients with a broader application landscape, we also connect the website to our enterprise software development, so that the marketing website and core systems reinforce each other rather than drifting apart.
The right one depends on scale, content architecture and the degree of integration with your existing systems. We advise on which flavour fits during the first conversation.
A marketing or corporate site for an organisation that wants to move away from WordPress but still needs a straightforward content workflow. Astro or Next.js frontend, a headless CMS of your choice, server-side rendering and a clean SEO foundation. A good fit for scale-ups and B2B companies that want to strengthen their website foundation without immediately committing to an enterprise project.
For groups and internationally operating organisations with multiple languages, regions and audiences. Native i18n in routing, geo-IP detection for content variants, and a content model that editors can maintain in several languages in parallel. Suitable for industrial groups, universities with international students and international media titles.
A website that is more than content presentation: portal integrations, agenda and booking flows, a headless commerce component, personalisation based on visitor segments and deep integrations with CRM and ERP. For SaaS companies that want their marketing site and product app to connect seamlessly, media houses with daily publishing streams, and government organisations with strict compliance requirements.
A production-ready website, with everything around it needed to manage and expand it independently.
Four patterns that tell us an organisation is ready for a custom website. If you recognise one, we'd be glad to talk further.
Your editors publish every day, the content model has ten types with interrelated links, and the WordPress database is cluttered with plugins that get in each other's way. A headless CMS with a custom frontend keeps things manageable where a standard CMS becomes messy.
Your site is a conversion funnel or an acquisition channel where every 100 milliseconds counts. Lighthouse scores of 95 or higher for LCP, CLS and INP are achievable with a custom frontend; they are rarely achievable with most plugin-heavy WordPress sites.
Since the European Accessibility Act came into force, public websites and many commercial services must meet WCAG 2.2 AA. A custom frontend with axe-core in the pipeline gives you far more control than wrestling with a theme on a standard CMS.
You operate in several languages, regions and domains, and want to manage content variants per country without endless URL workarounds. Native i18n in routing and a content model that understands variants is much cleaner than a multilingual plugin.
The stack we use by default, and why. We choose based on fit with your situation rather than on dogma: frontend, CMS, hosting and the surrounding tooling.
Astro for content-heavy sites with many static pages and little client-side interactivity: less JavaScript sent to the browser and faster Core Web Vitals. Next.js when server-side personalisation, dashboards or complex application functionality come into play. Nuxt for teams already working in the Vue ecosystem who prefer to stay there.
Directus when you need a lot of flexibility in the content model and want to remain self-hosted. Sanity for real-time collaboration and a strong editor experience. Strapi for maximum control when self-hosting. Contentful for enterprise projects with strict SLA requirements.
Vercel and Netlify for maximum convenience with Next.js and Astro projects. Cloudflare Pages for low costs at scale and a strong edge network. A self-managed Hetzner or GCP server when you want to keep data within Europe as a matter of principle, or when your IT policy requires your own environment.
Site search with Algolia, Typesense or Meilisearch, depending on scale and budget. Form flows and lead routing to HubSpot, Salesforce or your own CRM. Analytics in GA4 or privacy-friendly alternatives such as Plausible or Matomo. Cookie consent via TCF 2.2 or Klaro.
With OneDayBuild, we turn your idea into something tangible in one day for €1,150, so you can see whether further development is worth the investment. Decide to go ahead with the full build? Then we credit the full cost.
Explore OneDayBuild →A custom website is also a legal product. Since 2025, a great deal more regulation applies at website level. We build that compliance in from the architecture onwards, rather than applying it as a patch afterwards.
A conversation in which we understand which organisation you are, which brand you represent, which editorial team will be involved and which integrations are genuinely necessary. We check whether a custom build really suits you, or whether a lighter platform would be more practical.
Workshops with your editorial team and your brand team. We model the content types, map the site architecture and set up the design system. At the end: a prototype with the key templates and a configured CMS environment.
A working build you can test every two weeks. Your editors populate the CMS in parallel, your brand team validates the design system and your IT team tests the integrations. An MVP is in place after a few sprints; after that, refinement, a performance pass and an accessibility pass.
A controlled go-live, with monitoring and redirects from the old site. Afterwards, you choose whether to continue building in-house or have us keep managing it under a maintenance contract. Either is possible, and the codebase remains yours.
A custom website is not a one-off delivery but a platform that grows with your organisation. New markets, new languages, new content types and additional integrations almost always follow. We plan quarterly cycles in which we jointly prioritise what the website needs to do next quarter, and we run these on the same sprint rhythm we used to build it.
What clients usually want to know before we start.
A thirty-minute introductory call, with no obligation. We listen to what your organisation needs, ask about your content architecture and integrations, and point you in the right direction, even if custom development turns out not to be the smartest option.
On applatenmaken.com, our platform about custom software development, you'll find a deeper look at Custom software by sector.
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