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01

Web Design & Development

The web development company behind websites that sell.

Upforge is a Cincinnati web development and website design company. We build fast, custom websites that are set up from the first line of code to get found on Google and in AI answers. Then they turn more of those visits into customers.

150+
Websites shipped
165
Inquiries in 8 months, one site
90+
Mobile performance target
5.0/5
Google rating
Layered facets of forged steel lit from above, like the connected pages good web design uses to get found in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana
02Get found first

Found by Google. Cited by AI.

Search has split in two. Your customers still Google you, but now they ask ChatGPT too, and Google itself answers with AI. We build every site for both, starting with the first line of code.

The Google result

yourbusiness.com

Your Business: the obvious first choice

Clear services, real reviews, and straight answers. It looks like the company people hope to find.

Page one, earned
The AI answer

“For that, I’d look at yourbusiness.com because they have clear services, strong reviews, and they answer the exact question you’re asking.”

Cited source: your site
01

Structure Google can read

Semantic markup and structured data on every page, so search engines understand exactly what you do and where you do it.

02

Answers AI can cite

Clear, factual content and structured answers give AI systems material they can understand and cite. Citations depend on the system and the question; they aren't guaranteed.

03

Speed search rewards

We measure and improve load times and Core Web Vitals so speed supports the experience. No framework or performance score guarantees a ranking.

04

Authority that compounds

Reviews, markup, and internal links that keep adding up over months, instead of starting over with every redesign.

03Then convert

Built to turn visits into customers.

Getting found earns the click. The next three seconds decide everything else.

It opens before they blink.

Our sites load in about 1.2 seconds on average, so visitors on a phone stay on the page instead of hitting back.

It makes choosing you easy.

Clear pages with an obvious next step, and a design that looks like the company they hope you are. Trust gets decided on the first screen.

It does real work.

The features that take a visitor from interested to invoiced, built into the site from the start.

Online bookingQuote toolsMember loginsPaymentsCustomer portals

With every build

Easy content updates

Edit text, photos, blog posts, and pages yourself, with no developer needed.

Connected to your tools

Online payments, your CRM, and automatic follow-up emails, all wired in.

Know what's working

See which pages turn visitors into customers, and what your marketing earns.

Custom features built for you

Member logins, quote tools, online booking, and custom calculators.

Your data, safe and sound

Automatic daily backups and securely stored customer information.

We watch it for you

Around-the-clock monitoring catches slowdowns and errors early.

Key Benefits of a Website Built by Upforge

  • Found by Google and cited by AI answers, engineered from the ground up
  • Loads in about 1.2 seconds, so visitors stay and buy
  • Clear UX that makes choosing you easy
  • Built-in features: online booking, quote tools, member logins, payments
  • Easy content updates with no developer needed
  • Monitored around the clock with automatic daily backups
04Before & After

The same business. A website that finally works.

A slow, dated website quietly costs you customers every day. Drag any slider to see what we changed, and what it did for the numbers.

The Hometown Mortgage website after the Upforge redesign
The Hometown Mortgage website before the redesign
BeforeAfter

Mortgage Lending

Hometown Mortgage

A faster, clearer site that makes it simple for borrowers to start an application and reach a loan officer.

33Pages Rebuilt99/100Google speed scoreVisit the live site
The Watson Heating + Cooling website after the Upforge redesign
The Watson Heating + Cooling website before the redesign
BeforeAfter

HVAC Services

Watson Heating + Cooling

A move off a dated Wix site onto a fast custom build, with clear service pages and easy booking front and center.

39Pages Rebuilt100/100Google speed scoreVisit the live site
05The receipts

Measured results and the standards we build to.

90+
Mobile performance target

A 0.1s speed gain lifts conversions 8.4% (Deloitte and Google, 2020)

165
Inquiries in 8 months

Cincinnati Condo Connection, November 2025 to July 2026, after our rebuild and with no monthly plan

48%
of sites pass Google’s speed bar

Every Upforge site does (HTTP Archive, 2024)

Working with Upforge has had an immediate and noticeable impact in our business. This has been one of the smartest investments we made since opening our bar 18 months ago.
MattVerified Google review
06More than a website

Every site runs on Sonor.

Sonor is our own business platform: analytics, SEO, CRM, forms, and AI in one place. Every Upforge website connects to it automatically, so you can see what’s working and act on it without juggling a dozen tools.

Analytics
SEO
CRM
Forms
Signal AI
07How we build it

How we forge your website.

Your idea is the raw material. We shape it into working pages, test the details, and put it to work for your business. Most websites take 2 to 8 weeks, with a demo every week.

  1. 01Heat

    Discovery & scope

    Every forge starts with a purpose. We bring your goals, customers, and content into focus, then agree on what the website needs to do.

    You leave with: A written scope, fixed quote, and launch milestones.

  2. Molten metal flowing through a cracked, cooling crust, the design and development stage, where a website takes shape as working pages

    02Shape

    Design & development

    The site takes shape through working pages, not just a presentation. We build the design, content, and connections together, with weekly demos to guide the next pass.

    You leave with: A private preview you can use on your phone and desktop.

  3. Tempered steel shading from gold to peacock blue, the testing stage that checks a website's speed, accessibility, forms and mobile layout

    03Temper

    Testing & refinement

    Shaping gets us the form; tempering is about making it hold up. We check speed, accessibility, forms, and mobile layouts, then fix what gets in a customer's way.

    You leave with: A reviewed site, with launch checks and fixes documented.

  4. 04Finish

    Launch & ongoing care

    The finished work has a job to do. We launch with redirects, tracking, and a clear handover. Real searches and inquiries guide the improvements that follow.

    You leave with: Your live website, team handover, and an agreed support plan.

Pricing

Yes, it costs real money. And it's worth every dollar.

A website that ranks, loads fast, and converts keeps earning long after you've paid for it. Here's what it costs, and why it pays you back.

A custom website or redesign, designed and built end to end

$4,000to$15,000

Where yours falls depends on scope, and you get one fixed price before a line of code is written.

A $4,000 site36 monthsabout $111 / month over three years

So what's a new customer worth to you? Work out how many the site needs to bring in to pay for itself.

It pays for itself

A fast site that ranks and converts brings in business month after month, long after the invoice is paid. A cheap site quietly costs you customers, then costs you again to rebuild it right.

It never clocks out

Your website is the first thing customers check before they trust you. It works every hour, answers questions, and sells while you sleep, without a salary or a sick day.

One price, no surprises

You get a fixed price before we start, with no hourly meter and no scope-creep invoices. The number we agree on is the number you pay.

What changes the price

How big it is
A focused five-page site costs less than a large site with many sections and content types.
What it has to do
A brochure site versus one with logins, accounts, a customer dashboard, or custom tools.
What it connects to
Wiring in payments, your CRM, scheduling, and the other tools you already run on.
How custom it is
Online booking, member areas, quote tools, calculators, and features built just for you.
Who writes the content
Whether you bring the words and photos, or we research, write, and source them for you.
How fast you need it
The usual 2 to 8 week build versus a launch pulled forward to a tight deadline.

Every project is different. Tell us what you need and we'll send a clear, fixed-price proposal, typically during your consultation or within 30 minutes afterward.

Get your fixed-price proposal
Free website review

Want proof before you commit?

Request a free review of your current site: performance, design, and search visibility, with real numbers and an honest verdict. Three live sample reports are on the audit page, so you can read one before you ask.

09Web Development FAQs

Everything You Need to Know About Web Development

We build your site from scratch around your business, so it looks like your company, loads fast, and does exactly what you need. Template sites tend to be slow and look like everyone else's, and they break the moment you want something custom.

Yes. Moving a site to us is one of the most common things we do. We keep all your content, map redirects, check indexing and measure performance before and after the move. Clients tell us how much smoother everything feels afterward.

A website takes 2 to 8 weeks. Where yours lands depends on how many pages it has and whether it needs custom features like logins, booking, or a customer dashboard. If you're working toward a hard deadline, tell us and we'll plan around it.

Yes. We build every site so Google can read and rank it properly from day one, and we set up the technical groundwork that helps you climb the results. Paired with our SEO work, more people find you without you paying for ads. One measured example: after our rebuild, Cincinnati Condo Connection brought in 165 inquiries in eight months with no monthly plan. That's one site's result for that period, not a promise.

Yes. We build your site so you can change text, swap photos, and add blog posts or pages without a developer. We also train your team on how to manage it, and we're here if you ever want us to handle updates for you.

You get 30 days of support included for any fixes or tweaks. After that, you can keep us on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week. We don't ship your site and disappear. Many clients stay with us for years.

Yes. We show you progress every week, so you can give feedback as it takes shape. Adjusting features along the way is normal and expected. Large changes may affect the timeline or budget, and we'll always tell you upfront before anything changes.

Yes. Speed is a requirement on every build. Our sites load in about 1.2 seconds, and every build ships passing Core Web Vitals, something only 48% of mobile sites manage (HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2024). A slow site loses customers before they ever see your offer, so we make every site fast and keep it that way.

Design, development, testing, launch, 30 days of support after launch, and clear documentation. We also train your team so they're comfortable managing content on their own. You get one fixed price upfront with no hidden fees.

Yes, on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Security updates, content changes and fixes come out of it, and monitoring and backups keep your site fast and secure long after launch.

The website is yours. On final payment, the design, the content, and the code we write for you belong to you, and your data always does. Your proposal lists what's delivered and what stays a service. Sonor is the platform your site connects to, and it's ours. It runs the analytics, the CRM, the forms, the SEO tooling, and the AI features, so you get all of that working from day one without hiring anyone to maintain it. You use Sonor rather than buy it, and we'd rather tell you that now than have you find out later. If you want a site with its own backend instead, that's a custom build and we price it accordingly. Custom software is different again: an application or portal build comes with its own backend and you own 100% of it.

Sources

Each source opened and verified · last checked
  1. · Only 48% of mobile sites pass all three Core Web Vitals; LCP is the weakest metric at a 59% pass rate.
  2. · A 0.1s mobile speed improvement lifted retail conversions 8.4% and average order value 9.2% across 37 brand sites and 30M+ sessions.

Start your project

Let's build you a website that sells.

Two ways to start, both free. Send your project details and we'll reply with a real plan, or grab a time and talk it through with an engineer. There's no pressure and no sales script.

Tell us about your project

A sentence is plenty. We'll tell you how we'd build it and what it costs.

Forge coals catching their first orange glow, where a custom web design and development project starts

Rather just talk?

Book a free 30 minute call and get straight answers on scope, cost, and timeline.

  • A real engineer, never a salesperson
  • A clear proposal during or shortly after your consultation
  • Honest advice with no obligation