What are the standards for building a website today?

Loading speed, technical SEO from the first page, accessibility under the European act, the ability to manage content without a developer, conversion tracking in place, and handover of the site and the domain into your ownership. That is the minimum, whatever the platform and whoever the supplier.

What are Core Web Vitals and which values are good?

They are three measures Google uses to judge the experience of a page and which it uses when ranking results. LCP under 2.5 seconds, that is, how quickly the largest element renders. INP under 200 milliseconds, that is, how quickly the page responds to a click. CLS below 0.1, that is, how much the content jumps around while loading. Always measure on mobile; desktop numbers are considerably friendlier. On sites without much traffic it is worth knowing where the numbers come from. Google only returns real browser data above a certain volume of visits, so most company websites see only the lab score from Lighthouse. The supplier’s work gets judged by it, even though all it says is that the site has no gross technical faults.

Web development standards

Most enquiries about building a website revolve around design and price. Those are the two things that are easy to judge. What is harder to judge is the part that decides whether anyone finds the site at all, and whether you can work with it once it is live.

This is a list of what I consider the standard for a company website, and what I therefore do on every project, whatever platform it ends up on.

Loading speed

Google measures speed through what it calls Core Web Vitals and uses them when ranking results. These are not abstract numbers; they can be understood:

LCP under 2.5 seconds. How long it takes to render the largest element on the screen, typically the hero image or the heading.
INP under 200 milliseconds. How quickly the page responds to a click.
CLS below 0.1. How much the content jumps around while the page settles.

Google only returns data from real browsers for sites with enough traffic. For most company websites all that is left is the lab score from Lighthouse, that is, one load by a robot on a simulated phone. It is a useful hint, not proof that the site is fast for your customers. I went into it in the article on website speed and SEO.

Technical SEO

This is the part that proposals most often dismiss with a single bullet point. What a site should have on the day it launches:

One first-level heading per page and a sensible hierarchy of subheadings.
Its own title and description for every page, not one for the whole site.
Readable URLs without random numbers and parameters.
A sitemap and a robots.txt file that match the actual content.
Structured data for the content that should have it: the company, an article, FAQs.
Redirects from the old URLs if the site replaces an earlier one. This is the most common reason traffic drops after a redesign.

Content you can manage yourself

A website you cannot touch will age. That is why I build sites so that all of this holds true:

You change texts, images and whole sections yourself.
You assemble a new page from ready-made components, without calling a developer.
You see the change before it is published and it can be rolled back.

What the site will cost you in the years to come is decided right here, not by an hourly rate. I go through it in detail in the article on vendor lock-in.

Accessibility

Since 2025 the European Accessibility Act has been in force, and it applies to part of the commercial web as well. Obligation aside, these are things that make a site better for everyone:

Enough contrast between the text and the background.
Descriptions on images that carry information.
Keyboard operation, including a visible indication of where you currently are.
Forms with labels next to the fields, not just grey text inside them.

Analytics

Without measurement there is no way to tell whether the investment paid off. Launching therefore includes connecting analytics and setting up conversion events, that is, what counts as a success on the site: a submitted form, a downloaded document, a tap on the phone number. Otherwise, a year later, the site gets judged on whether people like it.

Handover

The last point, and the one people get to too late. Once the work is finished the site is in your account, the domain is in your name and the project and the copyright are yours. You can continue with anyone else at any time.

How I apply these standards to actual projects is described on the custom web development page.