Web development
Next.js development for sites that load fast and get found.
A modern framework used badly produces a slower site than the WordPress theme it replaced. The difference is what gets rendered on the server, how much JavaScript reaches the browser, and whether anybody measured.
Shark Labs is a Next.js development studio building marketing sites, web applications and headless-CMS front ends on Next.js 16 and React 19. Every build is server-rendered by default, measured against Core Web Vitals, tested for WCAG AA contrast and keyboard access, and shipped with the metadata, structured data and sitemap that make it indexable. Sites start at $1,500 and most go live in three to six weeks.
- 3–6 weeks
- Typical time from kickoff to live
- From $1,500
- Marketing sites and landing pages
- WCAG AA
- Contrast and keyboard access, verified
The framework is not the point
Next.js is a good default and it is not a performance strategy. A React app that ships four hundred kilobytes of JavaScript to render a paragraph of text is slow no matter what generated it, and plenty of agency Next.js sites are exactly that — every component marked as client, every page rendered on request, a spinner where the content should be.
The decisions that matter are older than the framework. What does the server send. How much of it is text a crawler can read without executing anything. How many round trips before the largest element appears. We build to those, and then we measure rather than assume.
- Static by default. A marketing page has no reason to be rendered per request. Static pages are faster, cheaper and cannot fall over under load.
- Client components are justified, one at a time. Interactivity earns a boundary; a decorative animation does not.
- Fonts self-hosted and preloaded, with size-adjusted fallbacks so text doesn't jump when the webfont lands.
- Images with explicit dimensions, modern formats and correct
sizes— layout shift is the easiest Core Web Vital to fail and the easiest to prevent. - Measured, not assumed. Lighthouse and real Core Web Vitals numbers before and after, reported to you.
Built so search engines and answer engines can read it
The main reason to server-render a marketing site in 2026 is no longer just speed. It is that a growing share of your traffic arrives via something that reads your HTML and never executes your JavaScript — an AI overview, a chat assistant, a link preview, a scraper feeding a model.
If your headline only exists after hydration, to those readers it does not exist. Every site we build ships its actual content in the server response, and we verify that by fetching the built page and reading the raw HTML rather than trusting the framework's marketing.
- Unique title, meta description and absolute canonical on every route, generated from one typed helper rather than hand-written per page.
- A generated sitemap and
robots.txtthat come from the real content, so a new page can't be forgotten. - Structured data that matches what's visibly on the page — and none that doesn't.
- Dynamic Open Graph images per route, so every shared link looks deliberate.
- An
llms.txtdescribing the site in clean markdown for language-model crawlers.
Accessibility, because it's the same work
Accessibility gets discussed as a compliance obligation and then treated as a retrofit, which is what makes it expensive. Built in from the start it is mostly free, because the things it asks for — real buttons, visible focus, sufficient contrast, sane heading order — are the same things that make a site legible to a crawler and usable on a phone in sunlight.
- Body text at 4.5:1 or better against its background, checked against a documented pairing table rather than eyeballed.
- Real
<button>and<a>elements, every one keyboard-reachable with a visible focus ring. - One
<h1>per page and no skipped heading levels — which is also how a page gets an accurate outline in search results. - Form labels wired to their inputs, with errors announced rather than only coloured red.
prefers-reduced-motionhonoured, not overridden by a component that wanted to animate anyway.
Content your team can actually change
A site that needs a developer to change a price is a site that will show the wrong price for three months. How editable it needs to be is a real decision with a real cost, and it is worth making deliberately rather than defaulting to a CMS because everyone does.
| Situation | What we build |
|---|---|
| Copy changes a few times a year | Typed content files in the repository. No CMS to license, host, patch or migrate. A change is a pull request. |
| Marketing owns the copy | A headless CMS — Sanity or Payload — with a schema shaped like your content rather than like a page builder. |
| A blog or a catalogue that grows | Headless CMS plus incremental static regeneration, so new entries publish without a rebuild. |
| A product with logged-in users | A web application, not a site. Postgres or Supabase underneath, and a different conversation about scope. |
What we don't do
We don't build on page builders, we don't take on WordPress theme work, and we don't do redesigns where the brief is that the current site looks dated but converts fine. Those are real jobs; they're just not ones we're the right studio for, and saying so early is cheaper for everyone.
What you get
Everything below is in the price.
A site that's actually fast
Static where it can be, with before-and-after Core Web Vitals numbers rather than a claim that it feels quick.
Technical SEO, wired in
Canonical, metadata, sitemap, robots, structured data and OG images generated from the content — not bolted on later.
Accessibility to WCAG AA
Contrast verified against a documented pairing table, full keyboard operation, semantic landmarks and heading order.
A design system, not a set of pages
Tokens, primitives and layout components, so page twenty looks like page one and adding page twenty-one is an afternoon.
A content model that fits
Typed content files or a headless CMS, chosen for how often your copy actually changes rather than by default.
Deployment and analytics
Live on your own hosting account, with analytics tracking the events that matter instead of only pageviews.
How it runs
From first call to shipped.
From $1,500
A marketing site runs $1,500–6,000 and goes live in three to six weeks. A web application with authentication, data and an admin area starts around $6,000. Discovery is $400–900 and comes off the build price.
Full pricing breakdown- 01
Scoping call — free, 45 minutes
What the site is for, who it's talking to, what has to be editable, and what 'working' would mean six months from now.
- 02
Paid discovery — 2 to 4 days
Sitemap, content model, a look at any existing site's real performance and search data. Ends in a fixed price and a date. $400–900, credited against the build.
- 03
Design system first
Tokens, type scale and primitives before any page. It looks slower for a week and then every page after the first takes a day.
- 04
Build and measure
Pages assembled from the system, with Lighthouse and accessibility checks run as we go rather than at the end when they're expensive.
- 05
Launch and hand over
Deployed to your account, with documentation on how to edit content and what to do when something breaks.
Stack
The specific things we build with.
Framework
Next.js 16 App Router
React 19
TypeScript- Server Components
Styling
Tailwind CSS v4- CSS-first design tokens
- Dark mode
Radix primitives
Content and data
- Typed content modules
Sanity
Payload
Supabase and Postgres
Hosting and measurement
Vercel
Cloudflare- Core Web Vitals monitoring
- Vercel Analytics
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
How do I choose a Next.js development agency?
Ask to see a site they built and run it through PageSpeed Insights while you're on the call. Then ask how many client components it has and why. A studio that can't answer that built a React app and deployed it on Next.js, which is not the same thing as building for Next.js. Also ask who maintains it after launch — most agencies have no answer, which is why our retainers are a named service.
What are the SEO benefits of Next.js?
The real one is that content can be rendered on the server, so crawlers, link previews and AI answer engines read your actual copy instead of an empty shell. Beyond that it gives you generated sitemaps and robots files, per-route metadata and canonicals, dynamic OG images, and static rendering that makes pages fast — and speed is a ranking factor. None of it is automatic; a badly built Next.js site has none of these.
How long does a Next.js project take?
A marketing site of five to fifteen pages takes three to six weeks from the end of discovery. A web application with accounts, data and an admin area takes eight to sixteen. The design system comes first, which front-loads about a week and then makes every subsequent page roughly a day.
Which CMS should we use with Next.js?
Often none. If your copy changes a few times a year, typed content files in the repository are faster, free, and one less system to patch. If marketing needs to publish without a developer, Sanity or Payload are the two we reach for. What we'd steer you away from is a CMS chosen because it was familiar and then bent into a page builder — that's how a fast framework ends up slow.
Can you rebuild our existing site without losing our rankings?
Yes, and the thing that protects them is boring: keep every URL, or map every changed one to a permanent redirect before launch. We crawl the current site, inventory the URLs and the pages that earn traffic, and carry both across. Rankings usually wobble for two to four weeks after any rebuild and recover; losing them permanently is a migration mistake, not an inevitability.
Do you do design, or only development?
We design and build. What we don't do is a pure visual redesign of something that already works — if the brief is 'make it look current' with no functional or performance problem behind it, a design studio will serve you better than we will.
Keep reading
Related work and reading
Service
App development
Web and mobile products from first screen to store listing, and the backend underneath — scoped so version one ships in months, not quarters.
Service
Retainers
Monthly engineering after launch: monitoring, patching, incident response and new features, at a price published on the page.
Service
AI integration
LLM features, retrieval and agents wired into the systems you already run — with evals, guardrails and a cost model that survives contact with real traffic.
Article
What a software maintenance retainer actually costs
Most agencies won't put a number on a retainer. Here are ours, the industry ranges we checked them against, and the arithmetic for deciding when hiring someone is cheaper.
Next step
Send us the URL.
If you have a site already, we'll run it and tell you what's actually slowing it down before you spend anything. If you don't, tell us what it needs to do.