Shopify Builds
Custom theme development, storefront architecture, subscription flows, B2B portals, headless front-ends, Shopify Markets. Meta CAPI wired in from day one. Every build includes a post-launch conversion audit at day 30.
Pillar 05 · Website Development
The site your marketing actually deserves to send traffic to.
Shopify rebuilds. WordPress migrations. Astro marketing sites. Custom ecommerce architecture. Every site we ship is conversion-engineered, Lighthouse 100 across the board, and owned by the same team that runs the paid media, the SEO, and the analytics — so there is no handoff between the people who drive traffic and the people who build where it lands.
Whatever your business needs to sell, serve, or scale.
Six disciplines. One in-house team. We do not subcontract web development to a freelancer after we win the marketing engagement — which is how most agencies hide the seam between "strategy" and "execution."
WordPress Rebuilds
Elementor, ACF, Gutenberg block libraries, WooCommerce, WPML. Plus the migrations nobody else will touch: shared hosting escape plans, plugin hell cleanup, Core Web Vitals rescue, security hardening, staging pipelines that actually work.
Astro Marketing Sites
Content collections, MDX, zero-JS-by-default output, sub-second LCP, 10/10 Lighthouse. The same stack this site uses. For marketing-heavy sites with hundreds of articles, Astro is the correct answer and most agencies do not know it exists.
Landing Pages
CRO-engineered single-page experiences for paid campaigns. Fast, variant-tested, heatmap-instrumented, conversion copy written by the same team running the ads. Average turnaround: 5 business days from brief to deploy.
Site Migrations
Platform moves done correctly: URL mapping, redirect audit, schema preservation, 302 vs 301 hygiene, GSC resubmission, canary domain testing. Zero SEO drops post-cutover. Zero downtime. Actually guaranteed, not claimed.
Conversion Architecture
The work most web agencies skip: persona-mapped information architecture, form-friction audits, pricing-page psychology, checkout flow rebuilds, A/B testing infrastructure. This is where the revenue actually moves.
Performance Floor Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals
actually pass.
Anyone can screenshot a 100 from a lab run. What matters is whether real users pass CWV thresholds on real phones on real networks for 28 consecutive days — because that is what Google ranks on. We ship sites that sit green on field data, not synthetic audits, and we monitor post-launch so they stay that way when the content team adds the next 40 images.
- ✓LCP < 2.5s on mobile field data (Google's "Good" threshold)
- ✓CLS < 0.1 across every route (no cumulative layout shift)
- ✓INP < 200ms on interaction-heavy pages
- ✓Post-launch CWV monitoring via the reliability layer
pagespeed.web.dev / mobile Passing
Core Web Vitals aperture-science.com · mobile · 28-day field data
Mobile Desktop
94 Performance
98 Accessibility
96 Best Practices
100 SEO
- LCP 1.8s Good
- CLS 0.04 Good
- INP 148ms Good
- FCP 1.1s Good
Five weeks. One site. Zero handoffs.
Most agencies scope websites in months. We scope them in weeks because a site that takes four months to ship is a site whose business case expired before it went live.
- 01
Discover
Audit the existing site, map inbound URLs, interview the stakeholders, define the conversion events that matter.
Week 1 - 02
Architect
Information architecture, sitemap, wireframes for the top 10 pages, platform selection, redirect map if migrating.
Week 2 - 03
Build
Theme development, component library, copy writing, content migration, schema markup, analytics setup. Preview URL live from day one.
Weeks 3–4 - 04
Launch
DNS cutover plan, staging QA, 301 mapping verification, production deploy, GSC resubmission, launch-day monitoring.
Week 5 - 05
Monitor
30-day conversion audit, CWV monitoring via GRRE, rank stability check, first round of CRO experiments queued.
Post-launch
We build on the stack that suits the problem.
Platform-agnostic is not a feature — it is the minimum standard for doing the work correctly. We pick the right tool for the engagement, not the tool that pays us the best affiliate rate.
Shopify Ecommerce Custom themes, Markets, subscription architecture, headless
WordPress Content + Hybrid Elementor, ACF, WooCommerce, migrations, hardening
Astro Marketing Content collections, MDX, zero-JS, sub-second LCP
Next.js Custom App Router + RSC when the logic needs it. See Development pillar.
Your next site should be your last site. Let us build it like it is.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What platforms does Gray Reserve build on?
- Gray Reserve builds on Shopify for ecommerce, Astro for marketing sites and editorial hubs, Next.js for applications and customer dashboards, and WordPress for content-heavy properties that require a visual editor. Platform choice is driven by the site's actual performance and maintenance requirements — not by familiarity bias.
- How do you achieve Lighthouse 100 scores without sacrificing design?
- Performance is an architectural constraint, not a last-minute fix. Self-hosted fonts eliminate third-party render blocking. Responsive images serve the correct format and size per device. JavaScript is deferred, scoped, and audited — no tracking scripts until consent is confirmed. The result is fast design rather than a performance-optimized design compromise.
- What does 'conversion-engineered' mean in practice?
- Conversion engineering means every layout decision is tied to a measurable action — scroll depth, CTA click rate, form completion, or purchase. Copy hierarchy, button placement, trust signal positioning, and page flow are tested against real traffic data rather than set once and left. The first version is a hypothesis; the optimized version ships after data.
- Do you build Shopify custom themes or use existing ones?
- Gray Reserve builds custom Shopify themes when the brand's requirements exceed what theme editors can produce. For most DTC builds, a highly customized licensed theme (modified at the code level) delivers the performance and design control needed without the cost of a ground-up custom build. The decision is made per project based on complexity and budget.
- What happens after the site launches?
- Every build includes a post-launch monitoring window with priority access for bug fixes and performance anomalies. Ongoing maintenance, CRO testing, and feature development are available as a retainer. Clients are never handed a built site without a clear path to continued improvement — the launch is the start of the compounding, not the finish.
Ready to Put This Intelligence to Work?
Fifteen minutes with us. No cost. No deck. Only the mathematics of what your current operations are leaving on the table.
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