Is the website the reason
a business can’t rank?A website the owner can’t change, built on slow foundations, holds back every page on it.
Request your free Website Overview
Website Design and Build for South African Businesses
A business signs off a new website, and it goes live looking sharp. Then it sits there. The pages load slowly, fresh articles never appear, and the phone stays quiet. So the fix on offer is a redesign. A redesign changes the paint. It doesn’t touch the engine underneath, and the engine is what loads the pages and what Google reads.
Zahavah Studio now builds websites on a headless CMS. A CMS, short for content management system, is the software where a website’s pages and words are written and stored. The common kind welds the writing side and the visitor side into one slow bundle, but a headless CMS splits the two apart. The content lives in one place, and a separate, faster system shows it to the world. We build both halves and manage them as one service, so nothing depends on a client logging in. We set out the full case in Why Your Website Is the Reason Your SEO Isn’t Working.
That faster system is built with Next.js, the tool we use to put the visitor pages together, and it runs on Vercel, a service that stores the site and serves it from wherever the reader happens to be. A page built this way opens in a fraction of a second, and a page that opens fast is one Google and the AI answer engines can read and quote. The website stops being a brochure that sits still and becomes the foundation its content grows on.
What we do on the website side
Website Design and Build
A website on Next.js and Vercel, with the copy for every page written as part of the build. Included in every package, so the site and the content that grows it arrive together.
Explore Website Design and Build →Website Redesign and Migration
Your existing site rebuilt onto Next.js and Vercel, on the same domain, with every old address redirected so the rankings you already have come with you.
Explore Website Redesign and Migration →Website Hosting and Care
Hosting on Vercel, security and framework updates, backups, uptime, and an hour of small changes a month, included with every website we build. Nothing for you to patch, and nothing to log into.
Explore Website Hosting and Care →How a Zahavah website comes together
Overview
We look at the current site, what the business sells, and the exact phrases customers type into Google to find it.
Build
We build the site on a headless CMS, with Next.js and Vercel underneath.
Fill
We add a set of articles that link together and cover the subject in full, which is what makes Google trust the site and rank it.
Grow
Steady publishing keeps the site climbing the results and keeps the business turning up in AI answers.
The build and the content run as one programme. See what each costs on the pricing page, or read how the services fit together.
What’s yours, and what happens if you leave
Plenty of agencies build your site on their own setup and keep the keys. You find out the site was never yours the day you try to leave.
Your content, your images, your domain, and your Google rankings are yours from the day you pay for them. We build and run the site on fast, modern tech (Next.js on Vercel), so you are never up at 11pm patching plugins or waiting on a slow page to load.
If you ever move on, you take your content and your domain with you. The site itself is licensed to you while the subscription runs and stays with us when you leave. No ransom, no awkward call with “the developer”. The hosting and care page sets it all out.
We work one of two ways: we build your site on our platform, or we publish straight into your own custom-built site. We do not build or publish on legacy platforms.
Learn how it works
Questions people ask about website builds
How much does it cost to have a website built in South Africa?
We do not sell a build on its own. Every package includes a website on Next.js and Vercel, hosted and cared for, from R4,500 a month on Foundation, with no setup fee. The website carries ten pages on Foundation, fifteen on Growth and thirty on Authority; pages beyond that are R500 each. The cheap end of the market sells a template with a stack of plugins on top, and the price of it arrives later: a page nobody waits six seconds for on a phone, and an owner up at 11pm patching the thing.
What is a headless CMS?
A headless CMS keeps your content in one place, separate from the pages showing it. You write and edit in a plain editor. Next.js builds each page from it in advance, and Vercel serves the finished page from a computer near each visitor, so it opens in under a second. A traditional website builds every page on the spot, each time someone asks for it, with the plugins along for the ride.
Is a headless CMS good for SEO?
It removes the two caps most sites carry: speed, and code Google cannot read cleanly. The pages are built in advance, so they pass the speed checks Google runs on a phone, and the code stays clean enough to carry the hidden labels telling Google and AI tools what each page is. It is not magic, and it does not rank a site on its own. A fast, readable site with nothing worth reading on it is still a fast, readable site with nothing on it.
Do I own the website you build?
Your content, your images, your domain, your data and your Google rankings are yours from the day you pay for them, and they leave with you. The website itself, its design, code and templates, is licensed to you while the subscription runs and stays with us, the same way it would on any website platform. If you leave, it stays with us, as do our content pipeline and reusable templates.
Can you publish into a website I already have?
Yes, if it is custom built with an API we can publish into. Every package runs on your own site for R500 a month less, with a once-off API integration of R7,000: we audit the site and connect to it, so your pages publish straight into your own system without getting in your developers' way. It does not work on WordPress or another legacy platform, and we do not build or publish on those, because the site under the content caps what the content can do.
See what these websites do once the articles start to rank.
View the Case Studies →Ready for a website built to be found?
Start with a complimentary overview. We map where a site stands today and what it would take to make it load fast and turn up when customers search.