Web Design Toronto

As a web design and development agency, Parachute custom-designs and custom-develops every website on WordPress, with no templates or themes, and builds technical SEO and GEO into every phase from discovery through launch. The Toronto agency has 23 years of experience and has delivered more than 400 websites for organizations including SickKids, Intact Insurance and the Government of Ontario. Clients rate Parachute 4.9 out of 5 from 34 reviews on Clutch.

Parachute Design has been in business since 2003. Jay Eckert founded the business as Jay Eckert Creative, and it has operated under the Parachute Design name since 2008. The agency focuses on custom web design, WordPress development and branding for mid-to-large organizations.

Parachute has a team of 12: six web designers and six developers. The same development team designs and builds every project, and Parachute does not use junior teams. The team has worked remotely since 2009, which lets it support clients across Canadian and US time zones.

Parachute Design is based in Toronto, Ontario, and works with Toronto businesses and clients across Canada and the United States. It has delivered websites and branding for organizations in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Founder and Creative Director Jay Eckert is a Registered Graphic Designer (RGD) with the Association of Registered Graphic Designers and a Certified Design Professional (CDP) with Design Professionals of Canada (DesCan), formerly the Graphic Designers of Canada. In 2025 he served as an expert witness in federal court for the Competition Bureau of Canada on web design, web development and UX design.

You work directly with Parachute’s project manager, who has two decades of experience in web design, web development and branding. The same project manager and web designer stay with your project from start to finish, and the lead developer assigned to your project joins where needed.

A custom website from Parachute, a Toronto web design agency, starts at $25,000 for a microsite. Most projects fall between $35,000 and $60,000. Enterprise builds with 20 or more unique page templates start at $65,000, and custom eCommerce builds start at $40,000. All pricing is in Canadian dollars. Two factors drive the cost of custom website design: the number of unique page templates and the functionality required, such as portals, online stores or custom integrations. For a starting estimate, try our website cost calculator.

Branding projects at Parachute, including logo design, start at $5,000 for a brand refresh and $10,000 for a new brand identity. A refresh updates an existing brand without replacing it. A new identity includes three original logo concepts, refined into a brand identity manual and business systems. Projects with brand extension assets, such as marketing materials, reports or presentations, are priced higher. Contact Parachute for a quote based on your brief.

Most Parachute website projects take 12 to 20 weeks from discovery to launch, and microsites can launch in as little as 10 weeks. Timeline depends on the number of unique page designs, the complexity of functionality, and the depth of SEO and keyword research involved. Projects with portals, eCommerce, or custom integrations take longer.

Ongoing maintenance plans start at $600 per month for core updates, plugin management, and staging-tested deployments. Higher plans add security audits, SEO health checks, accessibility audits, keyword tracking and 24/7 monitoring. Across a year, post-launch costs, including maintenance, typically run 15 to 25 percent of the initial development investment. Every project includes 60 days of complimentary support after launch.

Every Parachute website includes 60 days of aftercare. During that time we watch the site’s SEO and performance health and review your analytics and Search Console data at day 30 and day 60 against the baseline set in Discovery. Kinsta checks your site’s uptime. Your team is trained before or at launch, so you can manage content and search visibility yourselves. After the aftercare period, ongoing maintenance plans keep WordPress, plugins and security up to date.

Send your RFP or project brief through the quote form, or call Parachute at (416) 901-8633. A brief that lists your goals, page types and required functionality produces an accurate proposal fastest. Please use the form rather than social media messages, which are often filtered as spam.

Parachute follows a seven-phase process refined since 2003: Brand Foundation, Discovery, Strategy, Creative Design, Build and Test, Launch, and Manage and Grow. Discovery builds a deep understanding of your users, content and goals, starting with a review of your analytics and competitors. Every web design and website development project moves through all seven phases. Technical SEO and GEO are integrated at every phase, not added at the end.

We build websites only on WordPress because it is the most flexible platform for fully custom design and the most compatible with external tools and integrations. WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields lets us build any content structure a client needs without the limits of a closed platform, and it scales with your business growth. Online stores are built on WooCommerce, and when you already run another commerce, CRM or ERP system, Parachute connects your WordPress site to it.

No. Parachute does not use purchased themes or website builders. Every site is custom-designed and custom-developed. Off-the-shelf themes limit design and functionality and get in the way of building exactly what a client needs.

Yes. Every site uses Advanced Custom Fields, so your team edits structured fields instead of rebuilding layouts. Pages are built from components your team toggles on or off within an approved architecture, which keeps the design intact and gives search engines and AI tools a consistent structure to read. Training covers writing and managing content in WordPress, optimizing content and images for search and AI visibility, and the tools to track results.

Yes. Parachute builds custom online stores on WooCommerce, with payment integrations through Stripe, Moneris and others. Each e-commerce website gets a product architecture and checkout designed around how your business sells. If your business already runs another commerce platform, we connect your WordPress website to it. Custom eCommerce builds start at $40,000.

Yes. Every Parachute website uses responsive design and is mobile-optimized, so layouts, navigation and forms work on phones, tablets and desktops. We design the full experience, then optimize it for every screen size. Front ends use HTML5, CSS3 and vanilla JavaScript, with no heavy JavaScript frameworks on marketing sites, because performance optimization starts in the code and high performance websites need lean pages.

Parachute connects WordPress websites to HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo and other platforms, and builds custom API connections where no standard integration exists. Parachute builds the website side of the connection and the transfer of data to your platform. Configuration inside the CRM stays with your team or the CRM vendor.

Yes. Parachute manages web hosting on Kinsta on your behalf. Your hosting agreement and billing are directly with Kinsta, and our team handles the technical relationship for you.

Parachute almost never takes over websites built by another firm, because for most organizations a purpose-built rebuild is the better investment. Taking over an inherited site means paying a new team to learn an architecture it did not design, and some problems cannot be fixed cleanly without rebuilding. A website redesign at Parachute is a rebuild: we design and develop a new custom WordPress website. Over a few years, a custom WordPress site is often less expensive than ongoing repairs. Parachute maintains every website it builds.

Yes. SEO services are part of every Parachute project. We build technical search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) into every project from discovery through launch. GEO improves your website’s visibility in AI tools, helping your business get found and cited by tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. This is built in, not an add-on, and we train your team to manage it after launch so your visibility does not depend on us.

Parachute has deep experience with accessibility requirements under AODA, the ADA and WCAG. Ontario’s AODA website rules reference WCAG 2.0 Level AA; we design and build every website to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, a newer version with more success criteria. Accessibility starts in design, not as a retrofit: colour contrast, heading structure and target size are checked before development begins. Before launch, every template is tested with automated tools and checked by hand for keyboard navigation and focus visibility, because automated testing alone catches only a minority of issues. When you need a formal record, we provide a dated Technical Accessibility Conformance Statement. Overlay widgets do not produce real conformance, so every fix lives in the code itself.

Parachute specializes in B2B and professional services. Our deepest experience is in law firm, financial services, healthcare, government, and association websites, where credibility and compliance matter more than price and a professional website has to earn trust quickly. We work across all industries, and a small business is a good fit when the scope and budget align.

Start with the portfolio: look for custom work for organizations like yours, not variations of one template. Then ask what platform the site is built on, who will work on your project from start to finish, how SEO and accessibility are handled, and what support looks like after launch. Published pricing ranges and verified reviews are good signs. Our guide, How to Choose a Web Design Agency in Canada, lists the questions to ask.

Parachute builds exclusively on WordPress. We do not develop on Shopify, Webflow, Framer, or Kentico, and we do not offer content writing, translation, photography, video production, or mobile app development. For these, we refer vendors we have worked with, and you contract them directly. We also do not run social media campaigns or email marketing campaigns.