Technology
Technology, and why we choose it
A technology page is usually a wall of logos, which tells you what a supplier has installed and nothing about whether they should use it for you.
This page is organised by decision instead. For each area: what it is for, what we tend to reach for, and – more usefully – what the choice will cost you in maintenance, hiring and flexibility once the project is over.
How we choose
Requirements decide, not preference
The technology follows the problem, the team who will maintain it and the integrations it must live with. A studio that builds everything in one stack is telling you about itself, not about your project.
Boring where boring works
Mainstream, well-documented technology with a large hiring pool is worth a great deal in year three. Novelty is justified when it solves a problem you actually have.
Total cost of ownership, not build cost
Licences, hosting, maintenance discipline, the cost of hiring for it and the cost of leaving it. The build price is the smallest number in the decision.
You own the result
Code in your repository, standard tooling, documented build and deploy. Nothing depends on a proprietary tool of ours.
Frontend
What the user actually receives. This is where performance and accessibility are decided.
Semantic HTML and CSS
The foundation on every project. Accessibility, search comprehension and resilience all start here.
Modern JavaScript
Used deliberately and progressively. Behaviour added to a working document rather than the reason it renders.
Component frameworks
React and similar, where application state genuinely justifies them. Not used to render static marketing content.
Static site generation
For content sites where the fastest and most resilient answer is HTML on a CDN.
Trade-off: The recurring decision is whether a page needs a framework at all. Shipping one to render static content costs real INP and buys nothing.
Backend
Application logic, data and integration. Chosen for the team that will maintain it.
Node.js
Strong where the team is already JavaScript-fluent and where integration work dominates.
PHP
Pragmatic and well-supported, particularly in and around the CMS ecosystem.
Python
Where data processing, calculation or reporting is central to the product.
Relational databases
PostgreSQL and MySQL. Relational by default; a document store when the data is genuinely document-shaped.
Trade-off: Language choice matters far less than data modelling and hiring pool. We will pick the one your future team can staff.
Content management
How your team publishes without calling a developer.
WordPress
Custom themes with structured content models. High editorial volume, easy hiring, large ecosystem. Requires maintenance discipline.
Webflow
Where marketing autonomy is worth more than the platform ceiling. Presentational sites, not transactional ones.
Headless CMS
When content genuinely serves more than one destination, or teams need to release independently.
Custom content models
When the editorial workflow is specific enough that configuring a platform costs more than building it.
Trade-off: The failure mode is not the CMS, it is the build. A structured custom theme ages well; a marketplace theme with twenty-five plugins does not.
E-commerce
Selling, and the operations behind it. The checkout dominates this decision.
Shopify
Strong default for B2C and many B2B stores. Maintained checkout, good operational tooling. Watch platform fees and app sprawl.
WooCommerce
Where the store lives inside a content-heavy site, or data and hosting control matters. Not lower-effort, differently distributed effort.
Custom and headless commerce
When the selling model does not fit a platform: complex B2B pricing, configurable products, unusual fulfilment.
Trade-off: Hosted platforms rent you a maintained, compliant checkout. That is worth more than it looks until your pricing model genuinely will not fit inside it.
Infrastructure and delivery
Where it runs, how it gets there, and how you know it is healthy.
Managed hosting and cloud platforms
Chosen for the operational burden you want to carry, not for the lowest monthly figure.
CDN
Standard on anything with an audience outside one region. Frequently the largest single TTFB improvement available.
CI/CD pipelines
Automated build, test and deploy. Manual deployment is how staging and production diverge.
Monitoring and error tracking
Uptime, errors, performance and backup verification, with alerting. Problems should be found by us.
Trade-off: Under-invested infrastructure is invisible until the incident. The cost of a tested backup is trivial compared to needing an untested one.
Integration
Connecting what you already run so data moves without people re-typing it.
REST APIs
Documented, versioned, authenticated, with error semantics other systems can act on.
CRM and ERP integration
Field-level source of truth agreed before implementation. This is where integrations succeed or fail.
Payments
Gateway integration with multi-currency and local method support where the market needs it.
Webhooks and queues
Asynchronous processing with retries, idempotency and dead-letter handling.
Trade-off: Integrations are judged on their failure behaviour, not their happy path. Anything without retries, idempotency and alerting will lose data eventually.
Measurement
Knowing what actually happened.
Google Analytics 4
Configured around your business questions with a documented event taxonomy – not accepted at defaults.
Google Tag Manager
Governed: naming conventions, a documented data layer, and awareness of what each tag costs in milliseconds.
Google Search Console
Index coverage, query data and Core Web Vitals field data. The primary source of truth for search health.
Server-side and privacy-conscious analytics
Where consent rates, tracker blocking or data residency make client-side collection unreliable.
Trade-off: Every tag is third-party JavaScript on your main thread. Measurement is worth its cost when it changes a decision, and not otherwise.
Trying to choose a platform?
Tell us the requirements and constraints. We will give you a recommendation with the alternatives and what each one costs in year three.
Or email hello@applystudio.com – we reply within one business day.