Hire a Website Architect

You have decided your site needs someone to own its structure. This page is about what happens when you hire one: what changes for the business, what you receive, and how the work runs from the first call to a live site. If you want the role defined first, read what a technical web architect is and come back.

Call it a website architect, a site architect or a website architecture consultant — the job is the same. It means deciding which pages exist, what each one claims, how they connect, and how the result reads to the three audiences every site has: human visitors, search engines and AI systems. A designer decides how it looks. A developer builds what is specified. The architect decides what should be specified, and why.

You work with me directly. No account managers, no junior handoffs.

What a Website Architect Does for Your Business

• One answer, three readers. Your site says the same thing about who you are and what you sell to a visitor, to Google, and to ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. Most sites are written for the human reader, and the other two read whatever is left.
• Decisions made before they are built. Information architecture, the schema plan and the hosting and plugin stack are settled before the first page is built, not improvised halfway through the project.
• Problems fixed where they start. When a site looks fine and still underperforms, the cause is usually structural — rendering, schema, internal linking, Core Web Vitals — and patching the surface does not move it.
• Someone accountable for the structure. Most sites have someone who can build any page you describe, and nobody whose job is deciding which pages should exist. That gap is where the structural problems come from.

What You Get

• A written summary after the first call — what to fix, what to ignore, what compounds. It is free, whether or not we work together.
• A fixed-scope, fixed-price proposal. It states what gets built, what does not, and what happens if you want something added after signing. Projects are not billed by the hour.
• A documented architecture — which pages exist and how they connect, a structured-data plan mapped to each content type, and the hosting and plugin stack with every choice justified.
• Structured data that matches the page. The schema.org types your business actually needs, written to match what the page shows, then validated.
• A staged build you can check on real devices before anything goes live. You never see a half-finished page on your live domain.
• A pre-launch checklist, run and cleared: redirects, canonical tags, schema validation, a page speed baseline, a broken-link scan, mobile QA, SSL and a verified backup.
• A handoff document written for your site — how to edit what you will want to edit, what not to touch and why, the plugin update policy, where backups live and how to restore them, and a credentials inventory.

When an engagement starts with an audit, the audit produces a findings register, not a score. Each finding names the page, or the file and line, what breaks as a result, how severe it is, and what fixing it costs. Anything that cannot be evidenced is marked unproven rather than padded into the report.

How an Engagement Runs

1. Free 30-minute discovery call. No sales pitch — a scoping conversation about what you need and whether it falls inside what I do. If it does not, I say so and point you somewhere else.
2. Scope and proposal. If you want to proceed, a fixed-scope, fixed-price proposal follows within a few days. Scope changes are quoted and approved separately.
3. Architecture first. Information architecture, design system, schema plan and stack are decided before any page is built.
4. Build on staging, against that architecture, to your final content — not placeholder text.
5. Review rounds. The proposal states how many, typically two, with one consolidated feedback document per round.
6. Launch, once the pre-launch checklist clears.
7. Documented handoff.

On a project where content arrives on time and feedback rounds close in two to three business days, that is about ten weeks from the first call to launch and handoff. Most projects do not run on that schedule; the stage-by-stage version, with what I need from you at each step, is on how I work.

The work comes in three shapes:

• Project-based — a defined scope such as a rebuild, an audit, a migration or a structured-data overhaul. We define the deliverable, I do the work, you own the result.
• Ongoing partnership — the architectural layer your team does not have in-house, reviewing decisions before they get built.
• Specialist to your agency — architecture review, schema implementation or a pre-launch audit inside your existing workflow, without owning the client relationship.

Proof

Engagements from the portfolio, each one a live site:

• AJD Digital Solutions (agency) — tuned the agency site to 100/100 PageSpeed, and built the custom Elementor-to-native-WordPress header scaffold the team now reuses across client builds.
• The Handyman System (local) — a local search rebuild, structured around service-intent queries so Google sees what the business actually does.
• Coconut Yachts (luxury) — one homepage serving two audiences, charter buyers and yacht owners, with a 5-step concierge wizard wired to a 29-field booking form.
• Spa Safe Haven (service) — service pages organised around treatment-intent queries, tuned mobile-first because that is where booking traffic lands.

“Most agencies skip the part you can't see — the structure, the schema, the performance work under the hood. That's exactly where Jerome started. Pages that scored in the 70s pass clean now.” — Joe, AJD Digital Solutions

This site is held to the same standard. The technical web architect article was measured by PageSpeed Insights on 2 August 2026, mobile: performance 93, with Largest Contentful Paint at 2.6 seconds — a tenth over Google's 2.5-second threshold, reported as needs-improvement rather than rounded up. The audit tool I built for three-audience reviews is written up in the AUDXY case study.

Start With a Call

You describe the site. I tell you exactly what I see. We decide whether the work makes sense before any money moves. I work with a deliberately small number of clients at a time, and I am direct about fit. Book the free 30-minute call.

Not ready to hire yet? The free tools and the website audit show where your site stands first.