# WebForge Design — Full content dump > Sydney web design agency building Shopify stores, custom marketing sites and AI automation for Australian businesses. Single-file deep-ingestion document for LLMs, agents, and humans loading WebForge Design's full context into Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or similar. Generated: 2026-05-16 Canonical: https://webforgedesign.com/llms-full.txt Index: https://webforgedesign.com/llms.txt Companion sitemap: https://webforgedesign.com/sitemap.xml ## Table of contents - [Identity and NAP](#identity-and-nap) - [Areas of expertise](#areas-of-expertise) - [Services](#services) - [Premium Websites](#premium-websites) - [AI Automation](#ai-automation) - [Industries served](#industries-served) - [Plumbing](#plumbing) - [Building](#building) - [Dental](#dental) - [Medical](#medical) - [Fitness](#fitness) - [Salons](#salons) - [Beauty](#beauty) - [Real Estate](#real-estate) - [Logistics](#logistics) - [Legal](#legal) - [Retail](#retail) - [Hospitality](#hospitality) - [Accounting](#accounting) - [Construction](#construction) - [Allied Health](#allied-health) - [Electrical](#electrical) - [Case studies](#case-studies) - [Titan Fitness](#titan-fitness) - [Halo Essentials](#halo-essentials) - [Insights](#insights) - [How much does a custom website cost in Australia in 2026?](#how-much-does-a-custom-website-cost-in-australia-2026) - [How long does a custom website take to build in Australia?](#how-long-does-a-custom-website-take-to-build-in-australia) - [AI automation vs Zapier for an Australian SMB: when to use which in 2026](#ai-automation-vs-zapier-australian-smb) - [Shopify vs custom build for e-commerce in Australia 2026](#shopify-vs-custom-build-e-commerce-australia) - [How to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO](#how-to-migrate-woocommerce-to-shopify-without-losing-seo) - [Frequently asked questions](#frequently-asked-questions) - [Pricing](#pricing) - [Contact](#contact) ## Identity and NAP - **Legal / trading name:** WebForge Design (also: WebForge) - **Founded:** 2024 in Sydney, NSW, AU - **Slogan:** Websites that don't look made for the internet. - **Website:** https://webforgedesign.com - **Email:** info.webforgedesign@gmail.com - **Telephone:** 0452 388 769 (+61452388769) - **Address:** Sydney, NSW 2000, AU - **Geo:** -33.8688, 151.2093 - **Opening hours:** Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 09:00–18:00 AEST/AEDT - **Locale:** en-AU ## Areas of expertise - Shopify Development - E-commerce Web Design - Custom Website Design - Web Design Agency - React Development - TypeScript - Headless CMS - AI Automation - Workflow Automation - AI Agents - Conversion Rate Optimisation - Performance Optimisation - Technical SEO ## Services ### Premium Websites Page: https://webforgedesign.com/premium-websites Custom websites for Australian businesses where brand and conversion compound. Shopify storefronts for DTC and retail; marketing sites for service businesses, SaaS, studios and agencies; trade and clinic sites with sub-1.5s LCP and full local schema. **Pricing bands:** - Local trade / single-location clinic — AUD $4,500–$8,000 ex-GST - Premium marketing site — AUD $10,000–$25,000 ex-GST - Custom Shopify storefront — AUD $12,000–$40,000 ex-GST - Headless or enterprise commerce — AUD $40,000+ ex-GST **Default stack:** React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Shopify Hydrogen, Sanity, Contentful, Payload. **Typical timeline:** 4–16 weeks. ### AI Automation Page: https://webforgedesign.com/ai-automation Workflow automation and AI agents wired between an Australian business's existing tools. Lead-qualifying chat agents, email triage and routing, document-extraction agents, CRM automation pipelines. Async-first delivery, owned credentials, no proprietary platform. **Pricing bands:** - Lead-qualifying chat agent — AUD $4,500–$8,000 - Email triage and routing agent — AUD $3,500–$6,000 - Document-extraction agent — AUD $6,000–$12,000 - End-to-end CRM automation pipeline — AUD $12,000–$25,000 **Default stack:** Make, n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, direct API integrations. **Typical timeline:** 2–6 weeks. ## Industries served WebForge ships verticalised landing pages for 16 Australian industries. Each page is a self-contained answer to one buyer question, with industry-specific pain points and features. ### Plumbing Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/plumbing **Buyer question:** What does a good plumber's website actually need? **Answer:** A plumber's site only has to do three things well: load instantly on a phone, surface a tap-to-call number in under a second, and rank for every suburb you actually service. Most plumbing sites bury the phone number, run a 4MB hero image, and forget that 78% of plumbing searches happen on mobile after-hours. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Customers calling competitors first because the phone number isn't above the fold on mobile - Job photos and reviews scattered across Facebook with no central trust hub - Slow site dropping out of Google Local Pack on burst-pipe-style urgent searches - No after-hours form capture so leads vanish overnight - Manual quote turnaround eating the owner's evenings **What we ship for this vertical:** - Sticky tap-to-call header with after-hours auto-message - Per-suburb area pages targeting long-tail 'plumber in [suburb]' searches - Live Google review pull-through with schema markup - Quick-quote form wired into your CRM and SMS - Service icons (hot water, blocked drains, gas fitting, leak detection) with individual landing pages - Page-speed tuned for 3G/4G on a phone in a basement **From:** $4,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 3–5 weeks ### Building Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/building **Buyer question:** How do custom-home builders win premium clients online? **Answer:** Custom-home buyers research for nine to twelve months before they brief a builder. Your site is their longest single touchpoint. The winning move isn't more pages — it's editorial-grade project galleries, slow-paced storytelling, and an inquiry form that asks the right qualifying questions so you only spend time on briefs worth quoting. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Portfolio sites that compress beautiful architecture into thumbnail grids - No qualifying questions on inquiry forms, so the inbox fills with $400k 'budgets' - Awards and HIA accreditation hidden in the footer instead of headlining trust - No process page, so prospects can't tell you apart from the cheaper builder down the road - Slow image-heavy sites that fail Core Web Vitals on the architects' iPad demos **What we ship for this vertical:** - Editorial project case studies with architect/photographer credits - Lazy-loaded high-res image gallery (no Squarespace compression artefacts) - Process timeline page explaining design → DA → tender → build → handover - Awards block with HIA, MBA and BPN-style media mentions - Two-stage inquiry form: budget, suburb, project type before message **From:** $8,000 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 6–8 weeks ### Dental Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/dental **Buyer question:** What's different about a dental practice website? **Answer:** Dental sites have to convert anxious patients while respecting AHPRA advertising rules. That means no testimonials about clinical outcomes, careful use of before/afters, and language that builds trust without overclaiming. The technical part is the easy bit — Cliniko or Dentally integration, online new-patient booking, sub-2-second LCP for slow waiting-room Wi-Fi. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Generic 'dentist near you' template sites indistinguishable from the practice next door - Booking still routed through a phone call during clinical hours - AHPRA non-compliance risk from old testimonial copy - Treatment pages thin on detail, hurting SEO for 'Invisalign Sydney' type queries - No way for a nervous patient to see the dentist's face before booking **What we ship for this vertical:** - Cliniko or Dentally booking widget embedded directly in hero - Per-treatment landing pages (Invisalign, implants, veneers, kids dentistry) - Compliant patient story format that respects AHPRA testimonial rules - Practitioner profile pages with credentials, training, special interests - New-patient intake form with consent fields prebuilt **From:** $6,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 4–6 weeks ### Medical Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/medical **Buyer question:** How should a medical practice website be structured in 2026? **Answer:** The architecture is patient-first: each condition or service is its own page, written for a worried family member doing a midnight Google search. HotDoc or HealthEngine booking sits one click from the homepage. Doctor profiles include sub-specialties and special interests so patients can self-route. The site has to be accessible (WCAG AA), fast on a phone, and unambiguous about whether you bulk-bill. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Online booking buried two clicks deep instead of in the header - Doctor bios that read like CVs instead of explaining who the doctor is right for - No fees / billing page, so prospective patients ring before they decide - Inaccessible colour contrast or font size failing older patients - No telehealth landing page despite Medicare item codes for it **What we ship for this vertical:** - HotDoc, HealthEngine or HealthShare booking integration - Per-condition patient pages (asthma, diabetes, mental health, chronic pain) - Clear fees, bulk-billing and telehealth pages - WCAG AA accessibility pass with screen-reader-tested forms - Doctor profiles tagged by special interest for patient self-routing **From:** $6,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 5–7 weeks ### Fitness Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/fitness **Buyer question:** What makes a premium gym website different from a chain? **Answer:** Premium gyms compete on atmosphere — and the website is the trailer. Big, kinetic typography. Real photography of your actual coaches and floor space. A membership wall that feels exclusive instead of e-commerce. Class booking that doesn't dump users into a Mindbody page with the wrong branding. The site has to feel like the room before the user walks in. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Mindbody/ClassPass embeds breaking visual flow and brand consistency - Trainer profiles that all read the same — no personality - Hero photography that looks like every other gym ('hands chalked, ropes') - Generic class descriptions instead of specific outcomes - Slow site killing Google rankings against franchise competitors with bigger SEO budgets **What we ship for this vertical:** - Custom-styled Mindbody, Glofox or Hapana booking widgets - Kinetic typography and motion that signals premium - Per-class landing pages targeting 'pilates Bondi' / 'reformer Surry Hills' searches - Trainer profiles with individual bios, philosophy, social links - Membership funnel: trial offer → tour booking → join **From:** $7,000 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 5–7 weeks ### Salons Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/salons **Buyer question:** What should a hair salon website do in 2026? **Answer:** Hair salons live and die on Instagram, but the website is where new clients pick a stylist. The job is to make booking effortless on mobile, surface real client transformations, and let each stylist's specialty (balayage, vivids, curly cuts) come through. Fresha or Timely sits one tap from the hero. Stylist pages link out to Instagram so social proof keeps compounding. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Booking buried behind the menu instead of in the hero - Treatment menus dumped as PDFs killing SEO - No way to pick a specific stylist before booking - Insta-feed embeds that load slow and break on iOS - Generic stock photos instead of actual salon work **What we ship for this vertical:** - Fresha, Timely or Mangomint booking embed styled to match brand - Stylist profile pages with portfolio, specialties, Instagram link - Treatment menu page (not a PDF) targeting search terms like 'balayage Sydney' - Native lazy-loaded Instagram pull-through - Mobile-first design with thumb-zone CTAs **From:** $5,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 4–5 weeks ### Beauty Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/beauty **Buyer question:** How do cosmetic clinics market online without breaching AHPRA? **Answer:** Cosmetic clinics in Australia walk a regulatory line: you can describe treatments, but you can't promote prescription-only cosmetic medicines by brand or make outcome promises. The site has to be authoritative and aesthetic without naming Botox or Dysport explicitly in body copy. Booking through Fresha or Timely; nurse-injector profiles that build credibility; per-treatment pages that explain process, downtime and price ranges. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Old copy mentioning prescription brands by name (AHPRA compliance risk) - Generic stock images instead of real clinic photography - No transparent pricing, so patients ring for every enquiry - Nurse-injector profiles missing or thin on credentials - Booking flow not integrated, killing the funnel **What we ship for this vertical:** - AHPRA-aware copy framework reviewed before launch - Per-treatment landing pages with process, downtime, FAQ, price band - Practitioner profiles emphasising training and registration - Real-clinic photography direction (we can brief your photographer) - Booking integration with Fresha, Timely or your custom CRM **From:** $7,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 5–7 weeks ### Real Estate Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/real-estate **Buyer question:** What does a boutique real estate agency website need that a corporate one doesn't? **Answer:** Boutique agencies sell access — to off-market listings, to vendor confidence, to a postcode the agent actually lives in. The site has to feel less like a portal and more like a small magazine. Agent profiles do the heavy lifting; suburb guides drive long-tail SEO; the property feed pulls from Domain and REA without looking like a Wix template. No 'we are passionate about real estate' copy. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Sites that look like REA/Domain clones with a different logo - Agent profiles missing recent sales and average DOM - No suburb pages, so 'best agent in [suburb]' searches go elsewhere - Off-market section buried instead of being the pitch - Slow property card grids killing mobile bounce rate **What we ship for this vertical:** - Custom property feed from Domain/REA APIs, styled to match brand - Suburb landing pages with market commentary and recent sales - Agent profile pages with sales history, average DOM, recent reviews - Off-market / exclusive listings gated by simple opt-in - Vendor appraisal request form with auto-routing to the right agent **From:** $9,000 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 6–9 weeks ### Logistics Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/logistics **Buyer question:** What does a B2B logistics website need to win freight contracts? **Answer:** Procurement teams shortlist logistics partners on three signals before a single phone call: fleet capability, geographic coverage, and how clean the website looks. A serious logistics site needs a clear service split (linehaul, last-mile, cold-chain, 3PL), a coverage map of Australia, fleet specs, and a quote-request form that asks the right qualifying fields. No 'one-stop shop' copy. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Generic copy that doesn't differentiate from a 3PL competitor across town - No quote calculator or shortlist form, so RFQ enquiries arrive incomplete - Coverage and fleet data buried in PDFs - Mobile experience treated as an afterthought (despite operators using phones in trucks) - Slow case studies that don't quantify uptime, on-time delivery, or breakage rates **What we ship for this vertical:** - Service-split landing pages (linehaul, distribution, cold-chain, 3PL, last-mile) - Coverage map of Australia with per-state depots - Fleet page with vehicle classes, axle configurations, GVM - B2B quote form pre-qualifying volume, frequency, lanes, SLA - Case studies with quantified results (on-time %, savings, uptime) **From:** $9,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 7–10 weeks ### Legal Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/legal **Buyer question:** What does a modern boutique law firm website look like? **Answer:** Law firm sites used to lead with sandstone-courthouse imagery and bullet lists of practice areas. The new template leads with named partners, recent reported cases, and clear practice-area pages. Compliance with NSW Law Society advertising rules is baked in. Intake forms ask conflict-check basics. The site reads like the firm's actual culture, not a Sydney CBD template. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Generic stock-photo copy that doesn't differentiate from any other firm - Practice areas listed but not expanded into individual landing pages - Partner bios reading like LinkedIn — not what they're actually known for - No reported cases or notable matters, leaving credibility on the table - Intake forms missing conflict-check or matter-type fields **What we ship for this vertical:** - Per-practice-area pages (commercial, family, criminal, property, employment, IP) - Partner profiles with reported cases, bar admissions, areas of focus - Notable matters or case results page (compliant with regulator rules) - Conflict-check-aware intake form - Clear fees framework page (fixed-fee, hourly, success-fee where allowed) **From:** $9,000 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 6–8 weeks ### Retail Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/retail **Buyer question:** What's the cost of a custom Shopify build in Australia? **Answer:** Custom Shopify builds in Australia run from $12,000 for a small DTC brand on a refined custom theme through to $80,000+ for headless Hydrogen builds with bespoke checkout and ERP integration. The cost is design and CRO judgement, not implementation hours — the work that moves conversion is product photography, PDP architecture, and pre-launch behavioural testing, not template tweaking. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Theme-based store hitting a conversion ceiling around 1.5% - PDP layout treating every product the same regardless of price band - No cart drawer optimisation for AU shipping rules and Afterpay/Zip - Slow Shopify theme dragging Lighthouse mobile to the low 60s - Plugin sprawl: 28 apps doing what three custom sections could **What we ship for this vertical:** - Custom Shopify 2.0 theme with section-based merchandising - PDP CRO pass with social proof, AU shipping clarity, BNPL placement - Headless Hydrogen build for brands needing bespoke storytelling - Migration from WooCommerce or Magento with redirect mapping - Real Lighthouse 90+ on mobile (most agencies tap out at 60-70) **From:** $12,000 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 6–10 weeks ### Hospitality Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/hospitality **Buyer question:** What does a restaurant website need beyond a booking link? **Answer:** A restaurant website's job is to win the next reservation, not be a portfolio. That means the booking widget loads in under 800ms on a phone, the menu is HTML (not a PDF), and group/private dining has its own page with photography of the actual space. Hours, address, and the booking link are above the fold. Everything else is supporting cast. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Menu uploaded as a PDF, killing all SEO for dish names - Booking link buried below the hero - No group / function page, leaving private hire bookings on the table - Generic stock photography instead of the actual room - Slow site on phones, where 90% of decision-making happens **What we ship for this vertical:** - SevenRooms, OpenTable or ResDiary booking embed in the hero - Indexable HTML menu with dish-level schema markup - Group dining / private hire page with capacities, set menus, contact - Hours, address, and tap-to-call always visible on mobile - Photography direction (we can brief your photographer) **From:** $4,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 3–5 weeks ### Accounting Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/accounting **Buyer question:** How should an accounting firm structure its website for client growth? **Answer:** Accounting firms grow on referrals, but the website still has to convert a referred prospect inside three minutes. The structure: a clear service split (business advisory, tax, SMSF, bookkeeping), packaged pricing where possible, a tax-time landing page that ranks for 'tax return [city]' between June and October, and a Xero or QuickBooks onboarding flow that doesn't require a phone call. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Service pages reading 'we offer tax, BAS, payroll' instead of explaining who each service is for - No packaged pricing, so every enquiry is a custom quote conversation - No tax-time landing page, missing the seasonal search spike - Onboarding forms still PDF-based instead of digital - Generic stock photos of calculators **What we ship for this vertical:** - Service split pages (business advisory, tax, SMSF, bookkeeping, ASIC) - Packaged pricing where regulator rules allow (e.g. small-business bookkeeping tiers) - Tax-time landing page targeting EOFY-spike searches - Digital client intake form with ATO TFN-handling compliance - Xero or QuickBooks Pro Advisor badges with case studies **From:** $6,000 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 4–6 weeks ### Construction Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/construction **Buyer question:** What does a commercial construction company website need to win tenders? **Answer:** Construction tenders are won on three things the website must signal in 10 seconds: completed projects in the right sector, safety/quality accreditations, and the capability to scale. The site needs project case studies with value, duration and client; ISO/Master Builders accreditation displayed prominently; and a capability statement page that mirrors a typical EOI submission. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Project portfolio missing project value, duration, and named client - Capability statements only available as a PDF download (no SEO value) - Safety accreditations buried in the footer instead of headlining the page - No sector-split (commercial, civil, healthcare, education, residential) - Slow image-heavy site failing for tender-panel reviewers on mobile **What we ship for this vertical:** - Sector-split landing pages (commercial, civil, healthcare, education) - Project case studies with value, duration, head contract type, client - Capability statement as an indexable page, not just a PDF - ISO 9001 / 14001 / 45001 and Master Builders badges prominent in hero - Careers page targeting trade and PM hiring **From:** $9,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 7–10 weeks ### Allied Health Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/allied-health **Buyer question:** How should an allied health clinic build trust online? **Answer:** Allied health clinics — physio, psych, OT, dietetics — sell credibility before they sell appointments. The website's job is to make practitioner expertise visible (special interests, modalities, registrations), explain who each service is right for, and offer online booking through Cliniko or Halaxy in one tap. NDIS-eligible clinics need a clearly labelled NDIS page; private-health clinics need fund logos with item codes. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Practitioner profiles reading like resumes instead of explaining who they're right for - No NDIS page despite being a registered provider - Condition pages thin or missing, hurting 'physio for [condition]' SEO - Booking buried two clicks deep instead of in the header - Private-health fund coverage unclear **What we ship for this vertical:** - Cliniko, Halaxy or Power Diary booking in the hero - Per-condition pages (knee pain, anxiety, ADHD assessment, post-op rehab) - Practitioner profiles tagged by modality and special interest - NDIS page with plan-managed and self-managed clarity - Private health fund logos with rebate/item-code explanation **From:** $6,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 4–6 weeks ### Electrical Page: https://webforgedesign.com/industries/electrical **Buyer question:** What's the difference between a tradie site and an electrical-business site? **Answer:** A generic tradie site treats every electrical job the same. A real electrical-business site splits residential from commercial — they're different funnels. Residential needs tap-to-call, after-hours capture, and suburb-by-suburb landing pages. Commercial needs case studies, compliance certifications, and a tender-style capability page. One site, two paths from the hero. **Recurring pain points buyers in this vertical mention:** - Residential and commercial copy mashed together, confusing both audiences - No suburb pages, missing 'electrician in [suburb]' searches - After-hours form capture missing — leads vanish overnight - Compliance and licence numbers buried in the footer - Slow site dropping out of Google Local Pack **What we ship for this vertical:** - Two-path hero: residential vs commercial - Sticky tap-to-call with 24/7 emergency capture form - Per-suburb area pages (residential) - Commercial case studies with project value and sector - Master Electricians / NECA accreditation displayed prominently **From:** $4,500 AUD ex-GST · **Typical timeline:** 3–5 weeks ## Case studies ### Titan Fitness Page: https://webforgedesign.com/work/titan-fitness Live site: https://titanfitness.com.au **Industry:** Premium gym · Sydney **Date published:** 2025-09-12 **Date modified:** 2026-04-22 **Tagline:** Kinetic, bold, built for the room. An Eastern Suburbs gym site that signals what the floor feels like. **Challenge:** Titan Fitness had outgrown a templated Squarespace site that bore no resemblance to the room — Eastern Suburbs locals were walking in and saying 'I had no idea you looked like this from the photos.' Trial-to-member conversion was stalling at the website handoff, and they were losing 'gym Bondi' / 'gym Coogee' organic search to franchise chains with bigger SEO budgets. **Approach:** We rebuilt the marketing site from scratch on a custom React/Tailwind stack. Kinetic typography, real on-floor photography, and a hero that loads in under one second on a phone. Class booking embedded directly from their Hapana account, but styled to match brand. Trainer profile pages let prospects pick before they walk in. Suburb-level landing pages target long-tail searches we knew converted. **Measured results:** - Trial-to-member conversion: (pending client authorisation) — vs. previous Squarespace site - Lighthouse mobile: 98 — post-launch - LCP: 1.0s — mid-tier device - Organic sessions (90d): (pending client authorisation) **Stack:** React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Framer Motion, Hapana, Vercel ### Halo Essentials Page: https://webforgedesign.com/work/halo-essentials Live site: https://haloessentials.com.au **Industry:** Clinical skincare · DTC **Date published:** 2026-02-15 **Date modified:** 2026-05-15 **Tagline:** Clinical skincare for buyers who read the ingredients list. A Shopify storefront that earns the 'science-backed' claim with restraint. **Challenge:** Halo Essentials is a clinical-skincare brand selling actives — copper peptides, retinoids, vitamin C variants — to buyers who read the ingredients list before they shop. The brand needed an e-commerce storefront that conveyed clinical credibility without sliding into pharmacy-aisle aesthetics, with AU shipping clarity, fast mobile load, and a PDP layout where formulation and concentration carried as much weight as the imagery. **Approach:** We built the storefront on Shopify with a custom 2.0 theme, designed around restraint. Typography-led hero, ingredient-led product pages, and a checkout flow tuned for repeat purchase. AU shipping logic, free-shipping threshold messaging, BNPL placement (Afterpay, Zip) integrated at checkout. The brand voice is clinical first — every claim earns its place — so we kept motion and pattern to a minimum and let the product photography and copy carry the visual weight. A creator program landing page handles affiliate sign-up without compromising the main funnel. **Measured results:** - Lighthouse mobile: (pending client authorisation) — post-launch - LCP: (pending client authorisation) — mid-tier device · AU mobile - Conversion rate uplift: (pending client authorisation) — vs. previous storefront - AOV change: (pending client authorisation) — first 90 days **Stack:** Shopify 2.0, Liquid, JavaScript, Afterpay, Zip ## Insights ### How much does a custom website cost in Australia in 2026? Page: https://webforgedesign.com/insights/how-much-does-a-custom-website-cost-in-australia-2026 **One-line answer:** A custom website in Australia costs between $4,500 and $80,000+ in 2026, depending on whether you need a small marketing site, an e-commerce build, or a headless commerce system. **Author:** Daniel Ajami — Founder, WebForge Design **Date published:** 2026-05-13 **Date modified:** 2026-05-13 **Read time:** 8 min **Word count:** 2200 **Keywords:** custom website cost Australia, website price 2026, Shopify build cost AU, marketing site cost, web design agency pricing --- A custom website in Australia costs between $4,500 and $80,000 AUD ex-GST in 2026. The range is wide because 'custom website' covers everything from a five-page marketing site for a local trade business through to a headless Shopify Hydrogen build for an eight-figure DTC brand. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Counts of Australian Businesses, there were approximately 2.66 million actively trading businesses in Australia as of June 2024; the agency market that serves them is highly fragmented, with prices for the same scope often varying by 2–3x between studios. This guide breaks the market into four honest price bands, explains what drives the cost in each, shows where the value actually sits, and lists the hidden costs that often turn a $15,000 quote into a $22,000 invoice. Every figure is quoted in AUD ex-GST unless otherwise stated. ### What are the four price bands for custom websites in Australia in 2026? The Australian custom-web market splits into four price bands in 2026: local-trade sites at $4,500–$8,000, premium marketing sites at $10,000–$25,000, custom Shopify storefronts at $12,000–$40,000, and headless or enterprise builds from $40,000 to $80,000+. Local-trade sites cover plumbers, electricians, single-location clinics, and small service businesses, and are the largest band by volume — the ABS counts roughly 800,000 sole-trader businesses across the country. Premium marketing sites cover service businesses, SaaS startups, design studios and agencies — anywhere brand and conversion compound. Custom Shopify sits in band three because the platform's complexity (theme architecture, Liquid templating, checkout limitations on the standard tier) requires more specialist time than a marketing site of equivalent visual scope. Headless or enterprise builds cover multi-region commerce, ERP-integrated catalogues, and bespoke checkout flows where Shopify standard cannot meet the requirement. | Band | Price (AUD) | Typical buyer | What's included | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Local trade / clinic | $4,500 – $8,000 | Plumbers, electricians, single-location clinics | 5–8 page custom design, booking embed, suburb pages, basic schema | | Premium marketing site | $10,000 – $25,000 | Service businesses, SaaS, agencies, studios | Custom design + build, CMS, blog, conversion-tracked, full SEO/schema pass | | Custom Shopify | $12,000 – $40,000 | DTC brands $50k–$2m/month | Custom theme, CRO-led PDP, AU shipping logic, BNPL integration, migration mapping | | Headless / enterprise | $40,000 – $80,000+ | Multi-region commerce, complex storefronts | Hydrogen or Next.js, headless CMS, ERP/PIM integration, bespoke checkout | ### Why does a marketing site cost $10,000 when a Wix template is $30 a month? A Wix or Squarespace template costs $30 per month because it is a known-good design applied to your brand by you. A custom site at $10,000 pays for design and engineering judgement applied to your specific brand, audience and conversion goal — work the template cannot do because it does not know your audience exists. The work that drives the cost in band two is design direction (3–6 weeks of senior designer time), copy collaboration with the founder, performance budgeting against Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds (Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction-to-Next-Paint under 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1), motion craft, schema markup, and WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility compliance. Templates ship none of these as standard. The day a templated site stops converting is the day you discover you cannot meaningfully fix it without rebuilding off the platform — which is when buyers in the $10,000 band end up in the $20,000 band twelve months later. ### What drives a custom Shopify build over $20,000? Three things drive Shopify cost above the $20,000 mark. First, custom theme development on Shopify 2.0 with section-based merchandising — not a fork of the free Dawn theme — typically adds $8,000–$15,000 in design and Liquid templating time. Second, product detail page (PDP) conversion-rate work: social proof, Australian shipping clarity, BNPL placement (Afterpay, Zip, Klarna), and variant logic typically add $5,000–$10,000 and is the highest-ROI line item in the build. Australia has one of the highest BNPL adoption rates globally — the Reserve Bank of Australia has reported BNPL transactions accounting for approximately 2% of all card-and-BNPL spending, and the share continues to grow among 18–34 year olds. Third, migration mapping if you are moving from WooCommerce, Magento or a legacy platform — preserving SEO equity through redirect mapping, schema continuity and URL pattern preservation is engineering work, not a button you press, and typically adds $3,000–$8,000. - Custom Shopify 2.0 theme (vs. paid template): +$8,000–$15,000 - PDP-up CRO work with behavioural testing: +$5,000–$10,000 - Migration from WooCommerce or Magento with redirect mapping: +$3,000–$8,000 - Headless Hydrogen build: +$15,000–$40,000 - Custom checkout / Shopify Plus scripts: +$5,000–$15,000 ### How much does ongoing maintenance cost? Maintenance on a custom Australian website typically runs $300 to $2,500 per month depending on build complexity and how much ongoing CRO or content work is bundled in. A purely technical 'keep the lights on' retainer — hosting, uptime monitoring, minor bug fixes, security and dependency updates — runs $300–$800 per month for a marketing site, or $600–$1,500 for a custom Shopify storefront. Add design and CRO iteration (monthly A/B tests, copy experiments, schema updates, performance monitoring) and the number lands between $1,500 and $2,500. Small businesses that invest in monthly site iteration typically grow conversion rates several times faster than those that treat launch as 'done', which is why most agencies including ours bundle maintenance with light CRO rather than offering pure technical retainers below $500 per month. Hosting itself is rarely the dominant cost — Vercel or Cloudflare hosting for a typical marketing site runs $0–$200 per month at SMB traffic levels. ### Is GST included in the prices in this article? No — every figure in this guide is quoted ex-GST, as is standard practice across the Australian agency market. The Australian Taxation Office requires registered businesses earning $75,000 or more per year to add 10% GST to every sale, but agencies typically present quotes ex-GST because the buyer reclaims it on their next Business Activity Statement, so the headline price is the actual cost of the work. If you are comparing quotes from multiple agencies, double-check whether each one is inclusive or exclusive of GST before deciding — a $20,000 ex-GST quote becomes $22,000 inc-GST, and an agency that quotes inc-GST without saying so will look 10% cheaper than one that quotes ex-GST. Asking a single question — 'is this number ex-GST or inc-GST?' — eliminates the confusion. Australian agencies almost always invoice in AUD; international agencies sometimes quote in USD, in which case GST is added on import. ### What should you actually budget for in 2026? Budget by business category, not by feature wishlist. If you are a service business or trade with a single location, budget $5,000–$8,000 AUD ex-GST for a serious custom site with 6–12 suburb pages, schema markup, and call-tracking. If you are a clinic, studio or specialist with multiple practitioners or services, budget $8,000–$15,000 for a content-rich site with booking integration, FAQ, and per-service pages. If you are a DTC or retail brand doing $50,000-plus AUD per month in revenue, budget $15,000–$40,000 on a custom Shopify storefront with PDP CRO work and Australian shipping logic. If you are an enterprise commerce operator needing headless storefronts and bespoke checkout, budget from $40,000 and treat the build as a 3–6 month engagement rather than a 6–10 week one. Across categories, content production (photography, copy, video) is typically 20–30% of total project cost and is almost always quoted separately. > These bands are AUD ex-GST and reflect WebForge Design's own pricing as well as comparable Australian agencies surveyed in May 2026. Your numbers will vary with scope, content, photography and timeline. ### What hidden costs should you ask about up front? Five categories of cost are frequently missed in initial quotes and turn a $15,000 budget into a $22,000 invoice. Asking about them up front, in writing, is the difference between a project that lands on budget and one that doesn't. The most common cost overruns in Australian agency work trace back to one of these five categories — content production, copywriting scope, ongoing hosting, premium plugin licensing, or maintenance retainers — rather than to the build work itself. 1. Photography and video — most agencies do not include this; budget $2,000–$8,000 separately 2. Copywriting — collaboration is usually included, but a full ghost-write is extra ($1,500–$6,000) 3. Hosting — Vercel/Cloudflare from $0–$200 per month depending on traffic 4. Domain and SSL — under $200 per year for a .com.au plus SSL 5. Premium plugins or apps (Shopify) — typically $30–$300 per month per app 6. Ongoing CRO and content iteration retainers — see maintenance section above ### How long does a custom website take to build in Australia? Page: https://webforgedesign.com/insights/how-long-does-a-custom-website-take-to-build-in-australia **One-line answer:** A custom website in Australia takes 4 to 16 weeks to build in 2026 — 4–6 weeks for a marketing site, 6–10 for e-commerce, and 10–16 for headless or enterprise commerce. **Author:** Daniel Ajami — Founder, WebForge Design **Date published:** 2026-05-14 **Date modified:** 2026-05-14 **Read time:** 9 min **Word count:** 1800 **Keywords:** custom website timeline Australia, how long to build a website, website build time 2026, Shopify build time, headless commerce timeline --- A custom website in Australia takes 4 to 16 weeks to build in 2026. Marketing sites typically run 4 to 6 weeks from brief to launch. E-commerce builds run 6 to 10 weeks. Headless or enterprise commerce builds run 10 to 16 weeks. The variable that drives the range is rarely implementation speed — it is design judgement, content readiness, and integration count. This guide breaks down each band, names the variables that consistently extend or compress timelines, and explains where a 'rush' budget actually buys time versus where it just buys risk. ### What are the four timeline bands for a custom Australian website? A custom Australian website falls into one of four timeline bands in 2026: trade or single-clinic sites at 3 to 5 weeks, premium marketing sites at 4 to 6 weeks, custom Shopify storefronts at 6 to 10 weeks, and headless or enterprise commerce builds at 10 to 16 weeks. Trade and clinic sites are the fastest because the design system is tuned to the vertical, scope is small (5–12 pages), and most clients have all required photography and copy ready at brief. Premium marketing sites take a touch longer because design exploration is real — two live directions, multiple critique rounds, and copy collaboration with the founder. Custom Shopify and headless builds inherit timeline from integration count and migration complexity, not from page count: a 12-page Shopify site with eight integrations takes longer than a 60-page marketing site with two. ### What slows projects down most often? Three factors slow projects more often than any other: content readiness, integration count, and decision-maker availability. Sites blocked on photography or copywriting add 2 to 4 weeks to a typical timeline — industry surveys consistently find content collection is the most common reason website projects miss deadlines, not design or development time. Sites with three or more third-party integrations (CRM, ERP, BNPL, inventory, booking, fulfilment) add 3 to 6 weeks because each integration requires credential exchange, sandbox setup, and end-to-end testing across the live and new system. Multi-stakeholder approval chains (board sign-off, marketing committee, legal review) typically add 1 to 3 weeks of 'approved on Thursday, signed Wednesday' lag. The variable that matters most is not agency speed — it is single-decision-maker authority on the client side and content readiness at brief. ### What is the week-by-week breakdown of a marketing-site build? A typical 5-week marketing-site build runs as follows. Week one is brief and design direction: a 60-minute call on day one, fixed-price quote within 48 hours, and two live design directions presented in-browser by day five. Week two is design refinement and the start of the production build, with the client picking a direction and signing off on home plus one inner page. Week three is full production: every page built, content placed, motion polished, and a staging URL shared by day three. Week four is QA, performance budgeting against Google's Core Web Vitals (LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1), schema markup, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility audit, and analytics installation. Week five is cutover: redirect mapping, Search Console submission, and 14 days of post-launch monitoring. Daily-Loom reviews replace standups, so the client spends 10–15 minutes per business day on the project. ### How long does a custom Shopify storefront take to build? A custom Shopify storefront takes 6 to 10 weeks in Australia. Week one is brief, theme architecture sketch, and integration audit. Weeks two and three are design — homepage, product detail page (PDP), collection page, cart, and checkout where Shopify Plus is in scope. Weeks four through seven are theme development in Shopify 2.0 Liquid with section-based merchandising, plus integration of every third-party app the brand needs (typically 8 to 14 apps: reviews, BNPL, shipping, email capture, search). Weeks eight and nine are migration mapping if moving from WooCommerce or Magento, plus QA on AU shipping flow, payment methods, and GST calculation. Week ten is launch. Adding Shopify Plus checkout customisation extends the timeline by 2 to 4 weeks; adding headless Hydrogen extends it by 4 to 8 weeks because the storefront is no longer constrained to Shopify's theme architecture. ### How long does a headless or enterprise build take? A headless commerce build (Shopify Hydrogen, Saleor, or Next.js + Stripe) takes 10 to 16 weeks for a single-region storefront. Multi-region builds (3+ currencies, regional fulfilment, local payment methods) extend that to 4 to 6 months. The driver of timeline is not the frontend — it is the integration layer. A headless build typically requires custom integration with an ERP, PIM, OMS, tax engine, and at minimum one BNPL provider per region. Each integration is a discrete project: credential exchange, sandbox setup, contract negotiation, parallel QA against the live system. The frontend itself is usually 4 to 6 weeks of two-engineer work. The other 6 to 10 weeks is back-of-house plumbing. Enterprise-scale builds also typically include performance budgeting against Core Web Vitals at scale, CDN configuration, and load-testing for peak shopping events like EOFY and Black Friday. ### Does paying a rush fee actually buy time? A rush fee buys risk reduction, not raw speed, in 90% of cases. The agency-side bottleneck on a 4-week marketing site is design quality, performance budgeting and QA — none of which are accelerated by adding hours. What rush fees actually buy is: parallel design exploration (two designers working two directions instead of one designer working both), dedicated build attention (no other client juggling that week), and post-launch monitoring intensity (a person watching analytics in real time instead of checking once a day). Industry research has consistently shown roughly a third of 'rushed' projects miss their accelerated deadline anyway, typically because client-side content collection cannot be compressed. Rush fees are worth paying when the launch date is genuinely fixed (event, campaign, season), not when the buyer simply wants the project done sooner. ### What is the fastest a custom Australian website can be built? The fastest reasonable timeline for a custom marketing site in Australia is 10 to 14 working days, assuming three constraints are met: scope is small (single-purpose marketing site or campaign landing page), all content (copy, imagery, video) is ready at brief sign-off, and there is a single client-side decision-maker. Below 10 working days, quality on either design or performance compromises noticeably — the Google Core Web Vitals budget cannot be hit reliably without two days of dedicated performance tuning, and the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility audit cannot be compressed below one day without skipping checks. Anyone advertising a '5-day custom website' is either using a template (not custom), skipping accessibility and performance work, or charging for a smaller surface than buyers usually mean by 'website'. The honest minimum for a defensible custom build is two working weeks. ### What is the average build timeline across Australian agencies? Industry benchmarks for custom Australian websites in 2026 sit slightly slower than the bands above. Most agencies report median marketing-site builds of 8 to 10 weeks, median Shopify builds of 10 to 14 weeks, and median headless builds of 14 to 20 weeks. The reasons most agencies run longer than the 4–6 week marketing-site band: weekly standup cadence rather than daily Loom, sequential phases (design then build then QA) rather than parallel, and multi-stakeholder approval. A compressed timeline is not a function of cutting corners — it is async-first delivery with single-designer-per-direction discipline and decision-maker authority on the client side. When buyers compare timelines across agencies, asking 'what is your weekly cadence and approval structure?' surfaces the real difference between an 8-week and a 5-week build more accurately than asking 'how fast can you ship?' ### AI automation vs Zapier for an Australian SMB: when to use which in 2026 Page: https://webforgedesign.com/insights/ai-automation-vs-zapier-australian-smb **One-line answer:** Use Zapier (AUD $30–$150/month) for deterministic workflows with structured data; use custom AI automation (AUD $3,500–$25,000 to build) when workflows need reasoning over unstructured input or mid-workflow judgement. **Author:** Daniel Ajami — Founder, WebForge Design **Date published:** 2026-05-14 **Date modified:** 2026-05-14 **Read time:** 10 min **Word count:** 2000 **Keywords:** AI automation vs Zapier, Zapier vs custom AI agent, AI automation Australia SMB, n8n vs Zapier Australia, AI automation cost Australia --- For most Australian SMBs in 2026, Zapier is sufficient for any workflow with deterministic triggers and structured data — cost AUD $30 to $150 per month. Custom AI automation is necessary when workflows require reasoning over unstructured input (emails, documents, conversations) or when judgement calls happen mid-workflow — cost AUD $3,500 to $25,000 to build, then $50 to $300 per month to run. The split is not 'AI is the future, Zapier is the past'. Both are current tools that solve different problems, and choosing wrong wastes money in both directions: paying for AI when Zapier would suffice, or paying recurring Zapier subscriptions for years on a workflow that should have been an AI agent built once. ### What is the actual difference between Zapier and a custom AI agent? Zapier (and similar tools — Make, n8n, Power Automate) is workflow software that connects pre-built integrations and executes deterministic if-this-then-that logic. Custom AI automation is software that uses a large language model (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini) to make decisions mid-workflow about what to do next, based on inputs the workflow couldn't predict in advance. The functional difference: Zapier needs to know exactly what the input looks like and exactly what to do with it; a custom AI agent can handle messy inputs, ambiguous instructions, or workflows where step 3 depends on what was found in step 2. In practice most production AI workflows still call Zapier, Make or n8n under the hood for the deterministic glue — the question is rarely 'AI or Zapier?' but 'where do AI decisions sit inside the workflow, and where is the boring rule-based plumbing?' ### When does Zapier suffice? Zapier suffices for any workflow that is fundamentally if-this-then-that with structured data. Concrete examples: form submission triggers a Slack notification; new Shopify order creates a row in Google Sheets; calendar event triggers a Mailchimp campaign; HubSpot deal closing creates an Asana task. These workflows have clear triggers, fixed data shapes, and no judgement calls. Zapier publishes over 7,000 integrations as of 2026 and most SMB workflows are covered. Pricing for SMB volume is AUD $30 to $150 per month (under 10,000 tasks per month); the free tier handles 100 tasks per month and rarely covers real production. If you can describe the workflow as a flowchart with no ambiguous diamonds, Zapier is the right tool. The constraint to watch is per-task billing — workflows running tens of thousands of tasks per month can hit AUD $500-plus per month, which is the breakpoint to consider self-hosted alternatives. ### When do you actually need custom AI automation? Custom AI automation is necessary when at least one step in the workflow requires understanding context, summarising unstructured text, or making a judgement call. Concrete examples we have shipped: lead-qualifying chat agents that decide whether an inbound lead is in budget before routing to a human (requires understanding the conversation, not keyword matching); email triage agents that read inbound support emails, classify by urgency and topic, and route to the right team (requires reading and reasoning); document-extraction agents that read PDF invoices from inconsistent suppliers and pull line items into accounting (requires layout understanding across hundreds of vendor formats). McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report found that AI agent workflows reduce average task time by 60–80% in high-volume judgement work and only 0–20% in deterministic work — confirming the rule of thumb that AI agents pay back where the work is messy, not where it is already mechanical. ### What does a custom AI agent cost to build and run? A custom AI agent for an Australian SMB costs AUD $3,500 to $25,000 to build, then AUD $50 to $300 per month to run, depending on volume and model choice. Build cost: single-purpose agents (e.g. inbound email triage) typically run $3,500 to $8,000; multi-step agents with branching logic (lead qualification with CRM updates) run $6,000 to $12,000; multi-system workflows touching ERP, CRM and accounting run $12,000 to $25,000. Running cost depends almost entirely on which LLM you call and how often. Anthropic Claude pricing in 2026 is roughly USD $3 per million input tokens and USD $15 per million output tokens for the headline tier; OpenAI's frontier model is similar. A typical SMB-scale agent processing 1,000 messages per month at 2,000 tokens average runs $1 to $10 per month in model fees plus $20 to $100 per month in workflow hosting. Model costs fell roughly 80% between 2023 and 2026, which is why the maths now favours building. ### How does Australian data-residency and privacy law affect the choice? The Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) under the Privacy Act 1988 apply to any business handling personal information about Australians, and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires disclosure of eligible breaches within 30 days of becoming aware. Zapier processes data through US-based servers by default; OpenAI and Anthropic also process model calls primarily through US infrastructure. For most SMB workflows this is fine — cross-border data transfer is permitted under APP 8.1 when the receiving entity is subject to substantially similar protections — but workflows touching health data (covered by the My Health Records Act), legal client data, or financial data subject to APRA regulation need data residency checked explicitly. Concrete steps: confirm the model provider's policy on training (Anthropic and OpenAI both offer no-training-on-inputs for API customers), prefer Australian or regional API endpoints where available (AWS Bedrock now offers AU-resident Claude calls), and document the data flow as part of your APP Privacy Policy. ### Should you self-host with n8n or Make instead of Zapier? n8n and Make are direct alternatives to Zapier with different trade-offs. n8n is open-source, self-hostable, and free at scale if you run it yourself — typical SMB self-hosted n8n costs AUD $20 to $100 per month in infrastructure. Make is a hosted alternative with more visual workflow building and per-operation pricing typically 30–60% cheaper than Zapier at scale. The case for switching: if you run more than 50,000 Zapier tasks per month, n8n self-hosted will save AUD $1,000-plus per year and gives you full control over data residency. The case against: switching costs are real (rebuilding 50 workflows in n8n is 1–2 weeks of work), and the integration library is smaller (1,000-plus vs Zapier's 7,000-plus). For most Australian SMBs under 50 employees, Zapier or Make is the right pick and self-hosting is over-engineering relative to time saved. ### When should you build a custom AI agent over a Zapier workflow? Build a custom AI agent over a Zapier workflow when one or more of three conditions apply. First, the input is unstructured — emails, documents, conversations, voicemails, free-form web forms. Zapier cannot reason about unstructured input; it can only act when the input fits a known schema. Second, the workflow needs judgement mid-execution — deciding which path to take based on context, not based on a rule. Zapier can branch on rules; it cannot branch on a model's interpretation of a situation. Third, the volume is high enough that recurring Zapier fees exceed a build-once budget. A workflow running 50,000 tasks per month at $0.02 per task is $12,000 per year; if the same workflow can be built as a $6,000 custom AI agent running for $100 per month in API and hosting costs, payback is under 7 months. Below those thresholds, Zapier is usually the right tool and 'AI automation' is over-engineering. ### Shopify vs custom build for e-commerce in Australia 2026 Page: https://webforgedesign.com/insights/shopify-vs-custom-build-e-commerce-australia **One-line answer:** For 95% of Australian e-commerce brands under AUD $5 million annual revenue, Shopify is the correct choice; custom or headless builds win only with specific competitive needs Shopify standard cannot meet. **Author:** Daniel Ajami — Founder, WebForge Design **Date published:** 2026-05-14 **Date modified:** 2026-05-14 **Read time:** 10 min **Word count:** 1950 **Keywords:** Shopify vs custom build, Shopify vs custom e-commerce, Shopify Plus Australia, headless Shopify Hydrogen, custom e-commerce build cost Australia --- For 95% of Australian e-commerce brands in 2026, Shopify is the correct platform. The 5% where custom or headless wins are brands above AUD $5 million annual revenue with specific competitive needs Shopify standard cannot meet — bespoke checkout flows, multi-region tax logic, ERP-integrated catalogues, or marketplace functionality. This guide breaks down when Shopify wins, when custom build wins, and where headless Shopify (Hydrogen) sits as a middle ground. Shopify is often dismissed as 'just a template' by founders who haven't seen a fully-custom Shopify theme, and custom builds are often pitched by agencies as the default when they are rarely the right tool below eight figures of revenue. ### When does Shopify win against a custom build? Shopify wins for the 95% of Australian e-commerce brands under AUD $5 million annual revenue who need a working storefront, robust checkout, AU shipping integration, BNPL options, inventory management, and a CMS — all delivered in 6 to 10 weeks instead of 16 to 24. Concrete wins: Shopify ships PCI DSS Level 1 compliant checkout out of the box; integrates with Afterpay, Zip and Klarna with one toggle each; supports AU GST calculation correctly across all states and territories; ships an admin app for fulfilment and inventory that staff can learn in a day. Shopify counts millions of active stores globally and tens of thousands in Australia, with documented uptime above 99.99% across peak events. For brands without a specific business need Shopify cannot meet, custom is a $30,000-plus way to build something Shopify ships for AUD $60 per month plus theme development. ### When does a custom build actually win? A custom build wins in three specific situations. First, when checkout customisation is a competitive advantage — subscription gating combined with one-off purchases, multi-step quote-to-buy flows, country-specific tax handling beyond Shopify Plus's Functions. Shopify standard does not let you customise checkout; Shopify Plus does via Shopify Functions and Scripts, but with constraints. Second, when integration depth is required — ERP-driven catalogues where prices, stock and product data must sync from SAP or NetSuite in real time, or where the storefront must read from an existing PIM system. Third, when brand differentiation requires interaction patterns Shopify themes cannot deliver — bespoke product configurators, 3D product visualisation with WebGL, or commerce experiences closer to product design than retail. Outside those three buckets, custom builds typically cost 4 to 8 times what Shopify Plus costs over a 3-year horizon for the same business outcome. ### How do total costs compare over 3 years? Total cost of ownership over 3 years for an AUD $2 million annual revenue brand: Shopify Advanced (USD $399 per month) + custom theme build ($25,000 once) + apps ($300 per month) + maintenance retainer ($1,500 per month) totals approximately AUD $115,000. Shopify Plus (USD $2,300 per month) + custom Plus theme ($35,000 once) + apps ($500 per month) + maintenance ($2,500 per month) totals approximately AUD $230,000. Custom Next.js + Stripe build ($60,000 once) + AWS hosting ($600 per month) + maintenance ($3,000 per month) totals approximately AUD $190,000. Headless Hydrogen (Shopify Plus $2,300/month + $40,000 build + $2,500/month maintenance) totals approximately AUD $245,000. Custom looks cheaper than headless Hydrogen on paper because it skips Plus licensing, but in practice custom builds carry hidden costs in payment provider integration, ongoing PCI compliance, and security patching that Shopify absorbs. ### What is the performance difference? Shopify themes built on Dawn or modern alternatives reach mobile Lighthouse scores of 70 to 85 out of the box; custom Shopify themes built with performance discipline reach 90-plus consistently. A custom Next.js or headless Hydrogen build can reach 95-plus mobile Lighthouse if engineered correctly, but the gap to a well-built custom Shopify theme is typically 5 to 10 Lighthouse points, not the 30-point gap agencies sometimes claim. Core Web Vitals matter: Google has confirmed Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal since 2021, and successive Page Experience updates have increased their weight in mobile rankings. For brands where every 100ms of LCP improvement correlates with measurable conversion lift (typically high-traffic DTC brands above $5M revenue), headless or custom is worth the extra cost. For brands where the Lighthouse score is 78 versus 95 with no measurable conversion difference, the cost premium is not justified by the performance gain. ### When should you upgrade from Shopify Advanced to Shopify Plus? Upgrade from Shopify Advanced (USD $399 per month) to Shopify Plus (USD $2,300 per month, around AUD $3,600) when one of three triggers fires. First, monthly revenue passes AUD $1 million sustainably — the conversion uplift from custom checkout work typically pays back the upgrade alone. Second, you need multi-storefront functionality — Plus includes up to 10 expansion stores at no extra cost, which Shopify Standard does not. Third, custom checkout is a competitive advantage you cannot replicate elsewhere — Plus's Functions and Scripts let you build cart and checkout logic competitors on Standard simply cannot match. Below AUD $1 million monthly revenue, Plus rarely pays back. Above AUD $3 million monthly revenue, the question shifts to whether Plus is enough or whether headless Hydrogen is needed. Plus pricing also has a variable component: brands above approximately USD $800,000 monthly revenue pay 0.25% of revenue instead of the flat $2,300. ### What is headless Shopify (Hydrogen) and when does it win? Headless Shopify (Hydrogen) means using Shopify Plus as the commerce backend — catalogue, checkout, orders, inventory — while building the storefront frontend as a custom Remix or Next.js application that reads from Shopify's Storefront API. Hydrogen is Shopify's official headless framework. The case for it: keeps Shopify's checkout (the most converting checkout in commerce, by Shopify's own A/B test data) while letting the frontend be fully custom. The case against: roughly 4 to 6 times more expensive to build than a custom Shopify theme, requires senior React engineering for the frontend, and adds operational complexity. Hydrogen wins when a brand needs storefront-frontend control beyond what Shopify themes allow but does not want to give up Shopify's checkout. Typical use cases: marketplace-style storefronts, multi-vendor catalogues, and brands with parallel content needs (extensive editorial or community alongside commerce). ### What does migration from WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify cost? Migration from WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify costs AUD $5,000 to $25,000 depending on catalogue size, redirect mapping complexity, and how much customisation needs rebuilding. Catalogue migration alone (products, variants, inventory) costs AUD $1,500 to $5,000 using Matrixify or LitExtension automation. Customer migration (accounts, order history, addresses) adds AUD $1,000 to $3,000. SEO-clean redirect mapping — preserving search equity by mapping old URLs to new ones with 301 redirects — is the line item that drives total cost. A WooCommerce site with 5,000 products and 30,000 historical URLs requires 1 to 2 weeks of mapping work; a Magento site with multi-store complexity can require 3 to 4 weeks. The migrations that destroy SEO equity are the ones that skip URL mapping and let Shopify auto-generate new paths — typically 30 to 60% of organic traffic is lost in the first 90 days when mapping is skipped, with median recovery time of 6 to 9 months. ### How to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO Page: https://webforgedesign.com/insights/how-to-migrate-woocommerce-to-shopify-without-losing-seo **One-line answer:** A SEO-clean WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration needs five steps: crawl-and-inventory, URL pattern mapping, 301 redirect file, schema and content parity check, and 90-day post-launch monitoring. **Author:** Daniel Ajami — Founder, WebForge Design **Date published:** 2026-05-14 **Date modified:** 2026-05-14 **Read time:** 11 min **Word count:** 2100 **Keywords:** WooCommerce to Shopify migration, Shopify migration SEO, preserve SEO migration, 301 redirects Shopify, Shopify migration cost Australia --- Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO requires a five-step process: crawl-and-inventory, URL pattern mapping, 301 redirect file creation, schema and content parity check, and 90-day post-launch monitoring. Done correctly, migrations preserve roughly 95% of organic traffic in the first 90 days. Done incorrectly, they lose 30 to 60% of organic traffic in the first 30 days and rarely recover within a quarter. This guide is the playbook we use on every WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration. It assumes a catalogue of 100 to 50,000 products and an existing site with at least six months of organic search history. Smaller migrations (under 100 products) are simpler; larger enterprise migrations (50,000-plus SKUs or multi-store Magento setups) follow the same pattern with more parallelism. ### Why do migrations destroy SEO if done wrong? Migrations destroy SEO when URL structures change without redirects, when schema markup is dropped, when canonical tags break, or when content parity is lost between the old and new site. Google's own webmaster documentation states that 301 redirects pass essentially all link equity from source URL to destination, but only when the redirect chain is one step deep and the destination content matches the source intent. Industry analyses of migrations consistently find median organic traffic drops of around 40% in the first 30 days for migrations that skip URL mapping, versus a 5% drop for migrations that map redirects correctly. The compounding problem is that recovery is slow: average time-to-recover for a botched migration is 6 to 9 months, during which the brand loses revenue every day. The 2 to 3 weeks of upfront mapping work prevents a 6-month recovery slog and is the highest-ROI SEO work in any migration. ### Step 1 — Crawl and inventory the existing site Step one is a full crawl of the existing WooCommerce site to inventory every indexable URL. Use Screaming Frog (paid, AUD $260 per year, the industry standard) or Sitebulb to crawl every page, taking note of: every product URL, every category URL, every blog post URL, every static page URL, every parameter-driven filter URL Google has indexed. Export the crawl to CSV. Cross-reference against Google Search Console's 'Pages' report to identify URLs Google knows about that the crawl missed — typically these are old URLs already 301-redirected once, or pages with no internal links pointing at them but live in Google's index. The end state of step one is a single CSV with one row per old URL, columns for URL, page type (product, category, blog, static), current canonical, current title, current meta description, current schema type, and inbound link count (pulled from Ahrefs or Semrush). ### Step 2 — Map URL patterns to Shopify equivalents Step two is mapping each WooCommerce URL pattern to its Shopify equivalent. The default WooCommerce-to-Shopify mapping: /product/{slug} maps to /products/{slug}; /product-category/{slug} maps to /collections/{slug}; /blog/{slug} maps to /blogs/news/{slug}. Static pages map one-to-one. The real work is in the edge cases. Multi-level categories (e.g. /product-category/clothing/men/shirts) must flatten to a single Shopify collection level because Shopify collections do not nest in URL. Tag-based archives must map either to Shopify tags (which are not indexable as separate URLs by default) or to redesigned collection pages. Product variants that had standalone URLs in WooCommerce must collapse to the parent product URL on Shopify. Document every transformation rule in the mapping CSV from step one, with a 'new URL' column populated for every old URL. Anything not mapped is, by default, broken on launch day. ### Step 3 — Generate the 301 redirect file Step three is generating the actual 301 redirect file Shopify will use post-launch. Shopify accepts redirect uploads via Admin → Online Store → Navigation → URL redirects, or in bulk via Matrixify with a CSV import. The file format is two columns: source path (the old WooCommerce URL path, relative to the domain) and target path (the new Shopify path). Two rules matter most. First, redirects must be one-step: do not redirect from /old to /interim to /final; redirect directly. Second, redirects must return 301 (permanent) not 302 (temporary) — Google passes link equity only on 301s, and the WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration is permanent. Test every redirect with curl before launch: `curl -I https://yourdomain.com.au/product/example`. Confirm the response is HTTP 301 and the Location header points to the right Shopify URL. Test in batches of 50 if your CSV has thousands of entries. ### Step 4 — Match schema, canonicals and content parity Step four is making sure schema markup, canonical tags, and visible content match between the old and new site. Schema parity matters because Google uses structured data for rich results and AI Overviews. The minimum schema set: Product schema on every product page (name, price, availability, image, brand, sku); BreadcrumbList on every page with a breadcrumb trail; Organization schema site-wide; Article schema on blog posts; FAQPage where applicable. Canonical tags must match the new URL exactly — broken canonicals are the single most common cause of post-migration ranking drops. Content parity means: every product description, every category description, every blog post body should match the old site word-for-word at launch. SEO-relevant changes (title rewrites, meta description rewrites, content rewrites) should happen 4 to 8 weeks post-launch, after Google has confirmed the redirects and re-indexed the new URLs against the new site. ### Step 5 — Monitor for 90 days post-launch Step five is monitoring for 90 days post-launch. Set up Search Console for the new Shopify domain (if the domain stayed the same, no action; if the domain changed, register the new property and use the Change of Address tool). On launch day, submit the new sitemap.xml. Daily for the first 14 days: check the Search Console 'Pages' report for sudden indexing drops, the 'Performance' report for impression and click-through changes, and the 'Core Web Vitals' report for new mobile or desktop issues. Weekly for the next 11 weeks: check organic traffic in GA4 against the 30-day pre-launch baseline, with a 5 to 10% expected drop in the first 30 days and recovery to baseline by day 60. If traffic drops more than 15%, audit the redirect file again — typically a category or filter URL pattern was missed. ### What are the most common migration mistakes? Six mistakes destroy migrations consistently. First, skipping the redirect file entirely — the most common and most damaging. Second, redirecting everything to the new homepage instead of mapping URL-to-URL — Google treats blanket redirects as soft 404s and the link equity is lost. Third, changing URL slugs at the same time as migrating platforms — make one change at a time, change platforms first, optimise slugs 60 days later. Fourth, dropping product variants that had their own URLs without redirecting them to the parent product. Fifth, rewriting all titles and meta descriptions at launch — the change confuses Google's ranking signals; wait 30 to 60 days. Sixth, skipping the Search Console Change of Address declaration when changing domain at the same time. Each mistake is recoverable individually; combined, they typically cost 50 to 80% of organic traffic and 9 to 12 months to fully recover. ### What does a clean migration cost? A clean WooCommerce-to-Shopify migration in Australia costs AUD $8,000 to $25,000 ex-GST in 2026, separate from the cost of the new Shopify theme. Breakdown: catalogue migration via Matrixify or LitExtension automation ($500 to $2,000 in tool fees plus 4 to 12 hours of validation work); URL pattern mapping and redirect file generation ($3,000 to $8,000 depending on catalogue size); schema and canonical implementation on the new site ($1,500 to $4,000); content parity audit and fixes ($1,500 to $5,000); 90-day monitoring and remediation ($1,000 to $3,000). Larger catalogues with multi-language, multi-region, or multi-store complexity scale linearly. The build of the new Shopify theme itself is separate — typically AUD $12,000 to $40,000 — and runs in parallel with the migration work. Migration without theme rebuild (moving the existing design to Shopify Liquid) is rarely worth doing because the old design usually wasn't built for Shopify's templating constraints. ## Frequently asked questions ### What makes a website 'premium'? A premium website is custom-designed, custom-coded, and built to measurable performance budgets — Lighthouse 95+ on mobile, Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5 seconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, and Interaction-to-Next-Paint under 200 milliseconds. Those are Google's own Core Web Vitals 'good' thresholds, and most templated sites fall into the 'needs improvement' tier on mobile. The other half is craft: typographic hierarchy, motion that has a job, copy that earns its place, and a build that still looks considered six months after launch. The difference shows in the field, not the screenshot. HTTP Archive's annual Web Almanac consistently shows median mobile pages shipping around 500KB of JavaScript and 2.5MB total; our marketing builds typically ship under 160KB JS and 1.2MB total. That gap is what 'premium' means in measurable terms — not a price band. ### How much does a custom website cost in Australia in 2026? Custom websites in Australia cost between $4,500 and $80,000 AUD ex-GST in 2026. There are four bands: local trade or single-clinic sites at $4,500–$8,000; premium marketing sites for service businesses or SaaS at $10,000–$25,000; custom Shopify storefronts at $12,000–$40,000; headless or enterprise commerce at $40,000+. GST is excluded by Australian agency convention — always confirm before comparing quotes, since the 10% adder turns a $20,000 ex-GST quote into $22,000 inc-GST. Templated alternatives (Wix, Squarespace, paid Shopify themes) cost $0–$3,000 in design fees plus $30–$300 per month in platform fees, so the gap is real. The premium pays for design judgement, performance discipline, conversion-rate work, and a stack the buyer can keep alive after handover — not for visual polish alone. ### How long does a custom website take to build in Australia? Most custom marketing sites take 4 to 6 weeks from brief to launch. E-commerce builds run 6 to 10 weeks. Headless or enterprise commerce builds run 10 to 16 weeks. The variable isn't implementation speed — it's design judgement, content readiness, and integration count. Sites blocked on photography or copy add 2 to 4 weeks; sites with three or more third-party integrations (CRM, ERP, BNPL, inventory) add 3 to 6 weeks; migrations from WordPress or Magento with SEO redirect mapping add another 2 to 3 weeks on top. Templated builds on Wix or Squarespace can launch in days, but the constraint shifts from agency speed to platform limits — every site we have rebuilt off a templated platform was originally launched in under two weeks. The honest planning assumption: every week of timeline pressure trades against design quality, content quality, or scope. ### What's your usual process? Our process has four phases over 4 to 12 weeks. Phase one is a 60-minute brief that ends with a fixed price and a one-page system diagram, delivered within 48 hours. Phase two is two live design directions within five working days, presented in-browser at 1440px and 390px viewports — not flat Figma frames. Phase three is a daily-Loom production build with a staging URL from day three; the client reviews section by section instead of one big reveal. Phase four is cutover: redirect mapping, analytics, Search Console submission, and 14 days of post-launch monitoring. We work async-first, so the briefing call is usually the only synchronous step. Daily-Loom replaces standups — clients spend 10–15 minutes per working day on the project rather than an hour-long weekly meeting. Marketing sites run 4–6 weeks under this cadence; e-commerce and larger systems run 8–12. ### What stack do you build on? Our default stack is React 18 with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, deployed on Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. React remains the most widely-used frontend framework in industry, so it is the easiest stack to hire for and hand off to a future agency. We use a headless CMS where it earns its keep — Sanity, Contentful, or Payload for marketing sites; Shopify Hydrogen for commerce. The rule for stack selection is simple: pick the simplest stack the client's team can keep alive after we leave. We avoid bespoke server frameworks, undocumented in-house tooling, and platforms that lock the code to a specific contractor. Every site we ship is hostable on a standard Node-compatible serverless platform and editable by a future agency. Where speed matters more than CMS flexibility (e.g. trade or local-business sites), we ship plain Vite with a Markdown content layer instead of a CMS. ### Do you only build websites, or also product UI? Both. Marketing sites are the main practice, but the same craft transfers to product surfaces: onboarding flows, dashboards, settings screens, in-app empty states, and design-system components. For SaaS companies, onboarding is usually the highest-leverage design surface in the product; for marketplaces, the search and filter layer is. We pick up component-by-component or take a whole flow, depending on how the team prefers to work. We do not do native mobile development. The line for us is anything pixel-facing on the web or as a hybrid wrapper (Capacitor, Tauri); for pure native iOS or Android we hand off to one of three Australian studios we trust. Product work and marketing work go through identical phases — same brief format, same fixed-price discipline, same handover documentation. Most product engagements run 3 to 8 weeks per surface, depending on integration count. ### Where does AI automation fit in? AI automation is our second practice, separate from web. Some clients want only a website, some want only workflow automation wired between their existing tools, and some want both — usually the site first and automation layered into the back-office afterwards. We treat them as separate engagements with a shared sensibility: the same brief format, the same fixed-price discipline, and the same handover documentation. Typical scope and pricing: lead-qualifying chat agents for service businesses ($4,500–$8,000), email triage and routing agents for inbox-heavy operators ($3,500–$6,000), document-extraction agents for accounting and admin teams ($6,000–$12,000), and end-to-end CRM automation pipelines ($12,000–$25,000). Stack: Make, n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, and direct API integrations — no proprietary platform. AI work is async by default and most engagements complete in 2 to 6 weeks. Like the websites, the client owns every credential, prompt, and workflow after handover. ### Will I own the site after launch? Yes — fully. After launch you own the Git repository, the design files (Figma), the analytics property, the domain registration, and any third-party accounts opened for the project (CMS, hosting, error monitoring, payment providers). We hand over documentation on launch day: a one-page deploy runbook, a one-page contributor guide, and a 10-minute Loom walkthrough. You can keep us on retainer, hire a different agency, or take it in-house. There is no proprietary platform you cannot leave, no licensed code we can revoke, and no contract clause that limits where the work can be hosted next. The reason this is worth confirming up front: many Australian agencies in the SMB tier still ship sites on proprietary site builders or licensed templates that are not portable without a rebuild. Always ask three questions before signing: Who owns the Git repo? Who owns the design files? Can we leave without a rebuild? ### How do I know it'll actually perform? We publish performance budgets up front and hold them to launch. The floor on every marketing site we ship: Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5 seconds on mid-tier mobile, Interaction-to-Next-Paint under 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, mobile Lighthouse Performance score 95+, and JavaScript shipped under 160KB gzipped. Those are tighter than Google's Core Web Vitals 'good' thresholds (LCP 2.5s, INP 200ms, CLS 0.1) because field LCP runs 30–40% slower than synthetic LCP on Australian mobile networks. INP replaced First Input Delay as the third Core Web Vital in March 2024 — any agency still quoting FID is using outdated benchmarks. You see all metrics on a staging URL before launch, and we monitor against the baseline for 14 days afterwards. Sites that miss budget at launch are rebuilt against the budget. Performance is treated as a build acceptance criterion, not a nice-to-have. ### Do you build websites for tradies in Sydney? Yes — plumbers, electricians, builders, painters and other Sydney-based trades are a regular part of the practice. Trade sites need a different recipe than premium brand sites: tap-to-call discipline (thumb-zone primary buttons on every page), suburb pages for local search, after-hours capture (form-to-SMS for missed calls), and sub-1.5-second mobile LCP because trade buyers are mostly on mobile and on patchy networks. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' Household Use of Information Technology report has consistently shown that over 90% of Australian households now access the internet primarily on a mobile device, so the performance budget is part of the conversion strategy, not separate from it. We charge $4,500 to $8,000 AUD ex-GST for a standard trade site: 6 to 12 suburb pages, LocalBusiness + Service + FAQ schema, Google Business Profile sync, and call-tracking number setup. Treat this as a distinct vertical, not a discount template. ### What's the difference between Shopify Plus and standard Shopify? Shopify Plus is Shopify's enterprise tier and starts at approximately USD $2,300 per month (around AUD $3,600), versus standard Shopify which runs USD $39 to $399 per month. The pricing gap pays for: custom checkout via Shopify Scripts and Shopify Functions, ten dedicated sandbox environments, a dedicated Launch Manager, higher API rate limits, multi-storefront support (up to 10 expansion stores at no extra cost), and a B2B/wholesale module. Standard Shopify covers most brands up to roughly AUD $1m in monthly revenue; Plus typically becomes worth the upgrade above that — or earlier if checkout customisation is a competitive advantage (subscription gating, complex BNPL combinations, country-specific tax logic). The conversion-rate uplift from custom checkout work is the most common upgrade trigger we see; A/B-tested checkout gains of 5–15% are common in the $1m-plus AUD revenue band. Below that threshold the upgrade rarely pays back. ### Do you work with businesses outside Sydney? Yes. We are based in Sydney CBD but most clients are remote — recent engagements include Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Newcastle, Wollongong, regional NSW and Victoria, plus a handful in Auckland, Singapore and London. The work is async-first by design: the briefing call is usually the only synchronous step, and the rest moves through daily-Loom reviews, Slack or email, and a shared staging URL. Distance does not change timeline or pricing. The only difference is timezone arithmetic on launch day — Australian east-coast launches happen during AEDT business hours, and international launches are scheduled inside the client's working hours so we can monitor analytics and uptime in real time for the first two hours after cutover. We do not require any in-person meetings, though we welcome them when convenient. Melbourne is consistently the most common client location after Sydney itself. ## Pricing Verbatim copy of `/pricing.md` for AI buyers and automated comparison agents: ```markdown # Pricing — WebForge Design > Sydney web design and AI automation pricing. All AUD ex-GST. > Last updated: 2026-05-14. ## Custom websites ### Local trade / clinic - Price: from $4,500 AUD ex-GST - Buyer: Plumbers, electricians, single-location clinics, small service businesses - Timeline: 3–5 weeks - Includes: Custom design, 5–8 pages, booking embed, suburb pages, basic schema markup, Lighthouse 95+ mobile ### Premium marketing site - Price: from $10,000 AUD ex-GST - Buyer: Service businesses, SaaS, agencies, studios - Timeline: 4–6 weeks - Includes: Custom design + build, CMS, blog, conversion tracking, full SEO/schema pass, accessibility audit ### Custom Shopify - Price: from $12,000 AUD ex-GST (up to ~$40,000 for full-scope) - Buyer: DTC and retail brands doing $50k–$2m AUD per month - Timeline: 6–10 weeks - Includes: Custom Shopify 2.0 theme, PDP-up CRO, AU shipping logic, BNPL placement, migration mapping ### Headless / enterprise - Price: from $40,000 AUD ex-GST (typical range $40k–$80k+) - Buyer: Multi-region commerce, complex storefronts, ERP/PIM integration - Timeline: 10–16 weeks - Includes: Hydrogen or Next.js, headless CMS, bespoke checkout, ERP/PIM integration ## AI automation ### First automation - Price: from $5,000 AUD ex-GST - Timeline: 2 weeks - Includes: One high-leverage workflow (typically lead capture, quoting or inbox triage), production-grade, monitoring, 90-day measurement plan ### Multi-workflow build - Price: from $15,000 AUD ex-GST - Timeline: 3–4 weeks - Includes: 3–5 connected automations, AI decision layer, voice or chat agent where it fits ### Custom AI agent - Price: from $25,000 AUD ex-GST - Timeline: 4–8 weeks - Includes: Bespoke voice or multi-channel agent, custom prompts, tool use, monitoring, fallback humans ## Ongoing retainers ### Technical maintenance - Price: $300–$800/month AUD ex-GST - Includes: Hosting, monitoring, minor bug fixes, security updates ### CRO + content iteration - Price: $1,500–$2,500/month AUD ex-GST - Includes: Design iteration, conversion experiments, content updates ### AI automation tuning - Price: $1,500–$5,000/month AUD ex-GST - Includes: Ongoing prompt tuning, new automations, integration work ## Not included by default (common add-ons) - Photography or video: $2,000–$8,000 - Full ghost-written copywriting: $1,500–$6,000 - Hosting (Vercel/Cloudflare): $0–$200/month depending on traffic - Domain + SSL: under $200/year for a .com.au - Premium Shopify apps: $30–$300/month/app ## Contact - Email: info.webforgedesign@gmail.com - Phone: +61 452 388 769 - Brief: https://webforgedesign.com/contact ``` ## Contact To brief a project, visit https://webforgedesign.com/contact, email info.webforgedesign@gmail.com, or call 0452 388 769. **Reply window:** under 4 business hours during AEST/AEDT working hours. **Service area:** Australia. Remote-first; clients in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, regional NSW/VIC, and internationally. --- End of file.