3D Website Development

3D websites people remember — and can actually load

Most 3D websites are demos: beautiful on the designer’s Mac, a spinning wheel on everyone else’s phone. We build the other kind. Real-time scenes in Three.js and WebGL, with a byte budget agreed before anyone opens a modelling tool, so the site that wins the pitch is the same site that loads in two seconds on a mid-range Android.

What we mean by a 3D website

Not a video. Not a parallax effect. A scene that runs live in the browser — a product you can turn over, a space you can move through, a landscape that reacts to the cursor — rendered by the visitor’s own graphics chip using WebGL, the standard every modern browser ships. We build those scenes with Three.js, the library behind most of the memorable 3D sites you’ve seen, and with custom shaders where the effect needs them.

It is also still a website. It has to be found by Google, read by a screen reader, and usable by someone on a train with one bar of signal. We don’t treat those as constraints on the 3D; we treat them as the brief.

When a 3D site is worth it — and when we’ll tell you it isn’t

3D earns its cost when the thing you sell has a shape. Products that get configured before they’re bought. Spaces people want to walk through before they visit. Brands whose whole promise is “we’re not like the others” and need a site that proves it in the first second. Launches where being talked about is the metric.

It doesn’t earn its cost on a site whose job is to be read quickly — a blog, a documentation hub, most B2B lead-gen pages. If that’s your site, we’ll say so on the first call and build you a fast, sharp one without the scene. A 3D site that hurts your conversion rate is not a win for either of us.

How it stays fast

A weight budget, first. Before modelling starts we agree how many kilobytes the scene may cost. Geometry is decimated and compressed with Draco or meshopt; textures are resized and served as KTX2 or WebP; nothing ships at the size it left the artist’s machine.

The page loads before the scene does. Your headline, your text and your buttons are plain HTML that appears immediately. The 3D layer loads afterwards, on idle, and never holds up the first paint.

Every device gets the right version. A short script checks the visitor’s hardware before anything renders. Capable desktops get the live scene. Phones, low-power laptops and anyone who has asked their system for reduced motion get a still frame captured from the same scene — the picture, without the cost of drawing it.

We measure it on a cheap phone. Not on our monitors. Lighthouse on a throttled mid-range Android is the gate, and the score is in the handover document.

This site is built that way. The background you’re looking at is the live scene on a desktop and a still frame on your phone, and the page still ships a small JavaScript payload.

How a 3D project runs

1. Brief and budget. What should someone feel in the first three seconds, and what may that cost in kilobytes and milliseconds. Both get written down.
2. Prototype. A rough, ugly scene running in a browser within the first two weeks, so we are arguing about something real.
3. Art and build together. Modelling, shading and front-end code move in parallel; the asset pipeline is set up before the first final model exists.
4. Devices. We test on the phones your visitors have, not the ones we have, and cut until it passes.
5. Handover. Source, assets, pipeline, a written explanation of every trade-off, and the Lighthouse run that proves the budget held.

How much does a 3D website cost?

More than a template site, less than most people fear. The scene is usually a third to a half of the total. The honest answer depends on whether you already have 3D models, how many scenes there are, and how much of the site is 3D versus ordinary pages — send us those three facts and you'll get a range, not a form.

Will it work on a phone?

Yes, by design. Phones get a still frame captured from the real scene, so they see the same picture without their battery paying for it. Where a phone can handle a lighter live scene, it gets one.

Does a 3D website hurt SEO?

A badly built one does — Google can't read a canvas, and a slow page ranks lower. Ours put every word in plain HTML that loads before the scene, and we hold the same Core Web Vitals budget as our non-3D sites. The 3D is a layer on top of a fast page, not a replacement for it.

Do we need to supply 3D models?

No. We model from photographs, drawings or CAD files, or optimise models you already have. If you have a product team with CAD, that's the cheapest route.

How long does it take?

A single-scene site is typically eight to twelve weeks from brief to launch. Multi-scene or configurator projects run longer, and we'll say by how much after the prototype.

Can you add 3D to our existing site?

Often, yes. A hero scene or a product viewer can be dropped into an existing page as a self-contained component, with the same fallback and budget rules.