01Brisbane
Next.js and Shopify development in Brisbane — built for speed, designed to last.
The design is what people see. The build is what determines whether the site actually works — and keeps working — as the business grows.
02Under the hood
The stack.
Every Stoneglow build runs on Next.js 14 App Router with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS — a stack chosen because it produces fast, maintainable code that another developer can pick up without needing a guided tour. Content management runs through Sanity or Payload CMS depending on the project's requirements: both are headless, both give clients direct control over their content without creating fragility in the codebase. Ecommerce builds use Shopify, including headless configurations where a standard storefront would impose too many constraints.
Performance is engineered in, not bolted on after the fact. Target: sub-1.5 second mobile load times, green Core Web Vitals across the board, aggressive image optimisation and lazy loading, and zero render-blocking third-party scripts that haven't been deliberately chosen. This isn't academic — a one-second improvement in mobile load time has a measurable effect on conversion rates for appointment-based businesses.
For clinics and health practices, we handle booking system integrations directly: Cliniko, Halaxy, and Square are all in scope. These integrations are built to load asynchronously so they don't impose their performance budget on the rest of the page — a detail that matters more than it sounds when the booking widget is the primary conversion point.
03Why it matters
Why the build matters.
A slow site loses patients and customers before they engage. Not in a theoretical way — in a measurable one. Google's own data puts the mobile bounce rate jump at 32% when load time increases from one second to three. For a Brisbane clinic running Google Ads to a landing page, that's a material cost on every campaign. A site built on a page builder has a performance ceiling you hit in 18 months, if not sooner — and the workarounds required to get around that ceiling tend to make things worse.
Custom builds are investments in a codebase the business actually owns. There's no platform lock-in, no monthly fee that doubles when you need a feature, and no dependency on a plugin that stops being maintained. The site can be handed to another developer without a rewrite. For Brisbane businesses that want to understand the full scope of what a custom build involves, our services page has the detail, and recent work shows what this looks like in practice.