Ship the marketing site as software

Most studios still treat the marketing site as a throwaway. Drag a template, paste copy, connect a form plugin, hope Google notices. That is how you get a site that looks finished and fails the moment you need it to convert, rank, or stay fast.

We ship marketing sites the same way we ship product: typed routes, a real form pipeline, structured data, and a performance budget. The site is the first proof a client sees. If it is slow, inaccessible, or leaking leads, nothing else you say about engineering quality lands.

What a page builder quietly costs you

The pitch is speed. The bill shows up later as hydration, mystery CSS, and a contact form that emails a human and never writes to a database. You cannot version the layout. You cannot test the funnel. You cannot put a Content-Security-Policy in front of a stack of third-party widgets without breaking half of them.

• SEO metadata, hreflang, and JSON-LD become theme options instead of code you can review.
• A form plugin is not a pipeline. Honeypots, rate limits, and durable storage have to be designed.
• Every extra script competes with LCP. You do not get that budget back with a CDN checkbox.

What we actually ship

A Next.js App Router site with locale-aware routes, static generation where the content is known, and server components for everything that does not need a click. Copy lives in dictionaries, not in a CMS nobody will log into. Case studies and insights are registries - same shape in English and Serbian - so a missing translation is a type error, not a blank page.

The contact path is the product. Validate on the server, persist the lead, notify the studio, reply to the sender. If any of those steps is a plugin with a dashboard login, you do not own the funnel.

When a builder is still the right call

If the site is a one-week campaign and nobody will touch it after launch, a builder can be enough. The moment you need two languages, a real lead store, or a Lighthouse bar you can defend, you are writing software. Write it like software.