Website integrations
A website that feeds your systems instead of sitting in front of them
Most small business sites are a brochure parked in front of the software that does the work: the booking that arrives as an email and gets typed into a calendar, the enquiry that never reaches the CRM, the payment somebody reconciles by hand on a Friday afternoon. Each one is usually a small, specific job rather than a rebuild.
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Where the handoff breaks
The jobs your website hands back to a person
None of these are difficult. That is exactly why nobody has questioned who is doing them.
The booking that arrives as an email
Somebody picks a time on your site. It lands in an inbox, and then a human reads it, opens the calendar and types it in again. Every step between those two is a chance to double-book, and it happens most often on the days you are busiest.
The enquiry that never reaches the CRM
The form works. The email arrives. But nothing is in the pipeline, nobody is assigned, and whether that lead gets followed up depends on how full the inbox was that morning. Leads do not usually get lost dramatically; they get lost quietly.
The payment reconciled by hand
Money arrives through one system, the invoice lives in another, and somebody spends an afternoon each month deciding which deposit was which. The work is not difficult, which is exactly why nobody has questioned who is doing it.
The review request nobody sends
Everyone agrees they should be asking. Almost nobody does it consistently, because it depends on remembering at the right moment. A sequence that fires on its own outperforms good intentions, permanently.
The usual suspects
What tends to need connecting
Booking
Calendly, Acuity, Mindbody, Tock
Real availability on the page, and the booking in the calendar without anyone retyping it.
CRM
HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Filevine
Every form submission becomes a record with an owner, rather than an email with a hope attached.
Payments
Stripe, Square, PayPal, Authorize.Net
Transactions complete on your site and land in the back office already reconciled.
Email and SMS
Klaviyo, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign
New contacts enter the right sequence automatically, including the follow-up nobody remembers to send.
Reviews
Google, Yelp, and the platform your trade is judged on
Live review feeds on the site, and requests that go out on their own after the work is done.
Specialist software
Clio, Jobber, ServiceTitan, Glofox, Toast
Anything written for one trade in particular, so long as there is a supported way in and somebody has written it down.
Something missing from this list is rarely a dead end. Send the name of it and the first thing that happens is somebody reads its API documentation, which takes an hour and settles the question before you have spent anything.
How a connection gets made
Four steps, and the first one is free
Most of the risk in this work sits in the first step, and it costs nothing to find out. A connection to a platform with a decent API is a straightforward job; one that expects you to scrape a CSV out of an overnight email is a different conversation entirely.
Find out what it can actually do
Before anything is quoted, the question is whether the software on the other end exposes what you need. Most of the risk in this work lives here, and it is cheap to check: some well-known platforms document their API beautifully and some expensive ones barely admit to having one.
Agree what happens, in writing
Exactly which event triggers what, what the data looks like on both sides, and what should happen when something is missing or a person fills the form in wrong. Half the cost of a bad integration is discovering afterwards that nobody decided this.
Build it against your live systems
Connected server-side where the platform allows it, so credentials never sit in the browser and a slow third party cannot hold up your page. Where a script has to load in the page, it loads without blocking anything a visitor is waiting for.
Break it on purpose before launch
Submit the form with the wrong data. Disconnect the far end mid-request. Send it twice. The question is never whether it works on a good day, it is what it does on a bad one and whether anybody finds out.
When it breaks
Every integration breaks eventually
An API changes. A token expires. A plan downgrade quietly removes an endpoint nobody told you about. This is not a risk to be designed away, it is a certainty to be planned for, and the only question that matters is whether you hear about it from a monitor or from a customer asking why nobody called back.
So connections are built to fail loudly rather than quietly, to log what actually happened, and to hold onto the data instead of dropping it. A lead that arrives late is a nuisance. A lead that never arrives and leaves no trace is the reason people stop trusting their own website.
What you get
What a connection includes
Most single connections land between $2,500 and $8,000, and the scope is written down before the number is agreed. Half the list is about what happens when something goes wrong, which is the half that gets left out of a quote and the reason one connection outlives another.
- A written scope naming the systems, the trigger and the data on both sides
- The connection built, server-side wherever the platform allows it
- Failure handling, so a bad response does not silently swallow a lead
- Alerting, so a broken connection tells you rather than waiting to be noticed
- Tested against the real systems, including the ways it can go wrong
- Documentation good enough for another developer to pick it up
Worth saying plainly
Sometimes the answer is Zapier
A good number of the jobs on this page can be done with Zapier or Make for a monthly fee and an afternoon of your own time. When that is true you will be told, because a connection you can maintain yourself is worth more to you than one you have to call somebody about.
It stops being the right answer when the volume makes the per-task pricing hurt, when the logic needs more than one branch, or when a silent failure costs you a customer rather than a spreadsheet row. That is the point at which building it properly pays for itself, and not usually before.
Before you ask
The questions that come up first
It connects your website to a tool you already use so data moves between them without a person in the middle. A contact form can create the CRM record, send the confirmation, and notify whoever owns the lead, all from one submission. Without it, every one of those steps waits on somebody remembering to do it.
Between $2,500 and $8,000 for a single connection, and most land between $3,000 and $5,000. The number depends almost entirely on the far end: a platform with a documented, modern API sits at the bottom of that range, and one that expects you to scrape a CSV out of an overnight email sits at the top, or turns out not to be worth doing at all. That is why the first step costs nothing — reading the documentation takes an hour and settles the price before you have committed to anything. Several connections at once, or one that needs its own data and rules built around it, stops being this job and becomes application work, which is priced on the web development page.
Whichever one you are currently doing by hand most often. That sounds glib, but it is the right answer: the job that eats the most hours has the clearest payback and the least argument attached. If two are close, take the one where a mistake costs you a customer rather than an afternoon.
Only if it is built carelessly, and third-party scripts loading synchronously are the usual culprit. Connections are made server-side where the platform allows it, so the visitor's browser never waits on somebody else's API. Where a script genuinely has to run in the page, it loads without blocking anything the visitor is waiting to see.
It will, eventually — APIs change, tokens expire, a plan downgrade quietly removes an endpoint. What matters is whether you find out from a monitor or from a customer asking why nobody called back. Connections are built to fail loudly, log what happened, and hold the data rather than discard it, so nothing is lost while it is being fixed.
The site is built knowing it needs a booking tool or a CRM at a particular moment, without the specific platform being woven through the page. Swapping one for another is a change to the connection rather than a rebuild, and the documentation that ships with it means it does not have to be me who does it.
Usually, yes. Clio, Jobber, ServiceTitan, Glofox and Toast all have documented APIs and have been connected before. The name on the software is rarely what decides it. What decides it is whether the thing you need is reachable and described accurately, and there is no relationship at all between what a platform costs and how well it answers that. Name yours and you will get a straight answer before any money changes hands.
Start with the thing you keep retyping
Name the two systems and what should happen between them. You will get an honest read on whether it is worth building, worth automating with something off the shelf, or worth leaving alone.