64 answers, including the ones agencies avoid.

Shopify if you want the platform to handle hosting, security, payments and PCI compliance for a monthly fee, and you are happy working within its structure. WooCommerce if you already run WordPress, need unusual product or pricing rules, or want to avoid platform transaction fees. We will make a recommendation based on your catalogue and how you operate — and tell you the real trade-offs, including the ongoing costs.

Yes. We migrate products, variants, collections, customers, and order history where the platforms allow it. The part that matters most is URL mapping — an unmapped store migration can lose you every product page Google has indexed. We map and redirect them as part of the work.

GST, HST and PST are configured by province, so a customer in Ontario is charged 13% HST and a customer in Alberta is charged 5% GST without you doing anything manually. If you sell outside Canada we will set up the rules for that too.

We set up the payment methods Canadian shoppers expect — cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, plus Shop Pay or PayPal if you want them — and configure shipping rates for the way you actually ship: flat rate, by weight, by region, free over a threshold, or local pickup.

A store is a website plus a catalogue, plus payments, plus tax, plus shipping, plus the operational side of getting orders out. That is why stores start at C$3,990 rather than C$2,490, and why a substantial store is typically C$5,900–C$8,900+. Catalogue size, custom functionality, subscriptions or B2B pricing, and integrations with inventory or accounting systems are what move the number.

Only when a client already runs one and wants to keep editing the way they know. Page builders make the first version quick and every version after it heavier — they ship large amounts of CSS and JavaScript regardless of what a page uses, and they lock the site to a plugin that has to keep being paid for and updated. When we build from scratch we use a custom theme with proper editable fields, which is faster and easier to edit for the things that actually change.

WordPress core is well maintained; the overwhelming majority of compromised sites are running outdated plugins, abandoned themes, or a password reused from somewhere else. Security on a WordPress site is a maintenance question rather than a platform question, which is why updates, backups and patching are the substance of a care plan rather than an add-on to it.

The count matters less than what each one loads and whether anyone still uses it. A site with twelve well-chosen plugins can be faster than one with five badly built ones. The real problem is accumulation — plugins added for a campaign three years ago, still loading scripts on every page. Part of any redesign or care plan is auditing what is installed and removing what has stopped earning its place.

WordPress when you want to edit content yourself, add pages and posts freely, and use a large ecosystem of integrations. A fast static build when the content changes rarely and speed and security matter more than daily editing — this site is built that way. Shopify or WooCommerce when there is a catalogue to sell. InceptiCode picks the platform to fit the business rather than to fit a subscription we resell, and will tell you what you are getting and why.

No, and nothing we build depends on one. Every site is handed over with the domain, hosting account and files in your name, and it will keep running whether or not you pay us a monthly fee. A care plan exists because most business owners would rather someone else watched the updates, the backups and the uptime — not because the site stops working without it.

Content and design changes to the site you already have: text edits, new images, price and hours updates, a new team member, a seasonal banner, a page duplicated and reworked. Essential includes half an hour a month, Standard two hours, Priority five. New functionality and new sections are quoted as projects, because an hour of a maintenance retainer is not how a booking system gets built.

No, deliberately. Hosting stays with your host, in your name, paid by you — the same policy as every site we build. Reselling hosting means the agency controls the account, and the day you want to leave becomes an awkward conversation instead of a handover. We will manage the host on your behalf as part of a plan; we will not own it.

Uptime monitoring notifies a person rather than filling an inbox nobody reads until Monday. On Essential and Standard we investigate within business hours; on Priority anything broken gets a response the same business day. Nobody in this market is honestly offering a guaranteed overnight fix on a monthly plan, and we would rather state real hours than a number we cannot meet.

Yes, month to month, with thirty days notice and no cancellation fee. You keep everything — the site, the hosting account, the domain and the backups. A care plan that is hard to leave is a care plan that stopped earning its fee, and locking clients in is a way of avoiding that conversation rather than having it.

No. Rolled-over hours accumulate into a backlog that agencies quietly never work through, and a client who has banked nine hours starts to feel owed rather than served. If a month goes by with nothing to change, that is a month the plan spent on updates, backups, monitoring and security patching — which is the part of the work that only becomes visible when it has not been done.

No, and that is deliberate. A percentage of spend pays the agency more the more of your money it spends, which is a conflict of interest sitting inside the pricing model. The fee here is flat, and it does not change whether you spend C$500 or C$5,000 a month. Your ad budget goes directly to Google on your own card and is never billed through us or marked up.

You do. It is created in your name, billed to your card, and the conversion history stays with it. If you stop working with us you keep the account, the data and everything learned in it — which matters, because a campaign that has been running for a year is worth considerably more than an empty one.

No client campaigns yet, and the honest answer is worth more than an implied one. InceptiCode has built the tracking, the landing pages and the campaign plans, and is launching a campaign for this business first. What is on offer is the method and the transparency, at a price that reflects it. If you want an agency with a decade of ad accounts behind it, that is a legitimate reason to choose one — and there are several in Toronto.

None, and nobody honestly can. Google does not sell positions, competitors change their bids, and the cost per lead in a category is not something an agency controls. What can be promised is that the account is structured properly, that every lead is tracked to the click that produced it, and that you will be told plainly when the numbers say to stop rather than to spend more.

There is no minimum, but there is a point below which the exercise is not informative. Toronto web and service categories realistically run C$8 to C$20 a click, so a budget that buys fewer than roughly a hundred clicks a month will take a long time to tell you anything. We will say honestly when a budget is too small to learn from before taking a management fee for watching it.

Yes — that is what the Campaign Build is. The account, tracking, structure, negatives and ad copy are built properly once, then handed over with a written explanation of what to check each week. Plenty of businesses run their own campaigns perfectly well after that, and it is a cheaper answer than a monthly fee if somebody there has an hour a week.

Classic SEO is about being retrievable and rankable in a list of links. Answer-engine work is about being quotable — whether an assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Mode can lift a correct, self-contained sentence out of your page and attribute it to you. The technical foundations overlap heavily, but the writing does not: a passage that reads well in context can be useless once it is separated from the page around it.

No, and nobody can. Search results are not sold, ranking factors are not published in full, and generative engines return different answers to the same question on different runs. What InceptiCode can do is make a site technically eligible, structurally clear, factually quotable and measurable — then report what actually happened. Any agency offering a guaranteed position is either misunderstanding the product or misrepresenting it.

Yes. Titles, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, structured data, heading structure, a sitemap submitted to Google Search Console, fast loading and a sensible page hierarchy are part of every build at no extra cost. That is what makes a site eligible to rank. Ongoing campaign work — content production, local citations, digital PR — is separate, and we will tell you honestly when a business would get more from Google Ads than from waiting six months for organic results.

Very little, and it should be sold that way. Google Search does not use llms.txt for ranking or AI Overviews, most files are never fetched, and no measured citation effect exists. Anthropic recommends it and some retrieval workflows respect it, so this site publishes one because it is cheap and correct — not because it ranks. Anyone selling llms.txt as an AI-search growth lever is selling a file, not a result.

By measuring the two things separately. Search Console reports impressions, clicks and positions for classic search. For answer engines, InceptiCode runs a set of real buying questions against them on a schedule and records whether the business is named and whether it is cited, so the trend is visible over time rather than inferred from a single lucky screenshot.

Images that were never resized, third-party scripts, and page builders that ship large amounts of unused CSS and JavaScript. On most business sites the single biggest cost is images, and the second is the accumulated tags — chat widgets, analytics, pixels, review embeds — each added by someone who assumed it was free. Hosting is far less often the cause than it gets blamed for.

Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google publishes: Largest Contentful Paint, how long the main content takes to appear; Interaction to Next Paint, how quickly the page responds when tapped; and Cumulative Layout Shift, how much the page moves while loading. They are a genuine, though modest, ranking input. Their real value is as a proxy for whether the site feels broken on a mid-range phone, which is what actually costs enquiries.

A useful target is main content appearing within 2.5 seconds on a mid-range phone over a throttled mobile connection, with no visible layout shift. For reference, incepticode.com measures Largest Contentful Paint at around one second under 4× CPU throttling and a Slow 4G profile — inside Google's 2.5-second threshold by a wide margin — with Cumulative Layout Shift at zero. Those figures come from a test script kept in the repository and run before deploys, and every page is checked against the budget rather than one flattering page being quoted.

Often yes, and it is worth trying first. Image compression and correct sizing, removing tags nobody uses, deferring what does not block rendering, and fixing layout shift will get most business sites into a respectable range. The point where a rebuild becomes the cheaper answer is when the theme or page builder itself is the bottleneck — at which stage optimisation work is being spent propping up something that will keep regressing.