Agency website builders are specialised tools designed to fulfil the needs of digital marketing agencies and web design firms that manage website creation and maintenance for multiple clients.
These platforms offer a range of features tailored to help agencies streamline their processes, collaborate effectively with their teams, and deliver high-quality websites to their clients.
Agency website builders are a class of software explicitly addressing the challenges digital marketing agencies and web design firms face. These entities typically manage an extensive portfolio of client websites, each with its requirements, design preferences, and functional specifications.
Traditional website-building tools may need to be adequate for such operations due to the agency work’s scale, complexity, and collaborative nature.
Key Features and Benefits of Agency Website Builders
Website builders are vital tools for agencies, providing a blend of efficiency, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use, all of which are essential for delivering high-quality web solutions in a dynamic and competitive digital marketplace. They offer a myriad of features and benefits that will help deliver your business to success.
Here are the key features of agency website builders you need to learn about:
Streamlined Workflow
Agency website builders provide a streamlined workflow that allows teams to move from design to deployment efficiently. They often include project management tools to track progress and meet deadlines.
Collaboration Tools
Collaboration is critical in agency settings where multiple stakeholders are involved. These builders often include features for real-time collaboration, allowing designers, developers, copywriters, and clients to work together seamlessly.
White Label Solutions
Many agency website builders offer white-label solutions, which allow agencies to brand the platform as their own when presenting it to clients. This enhances the agency’s branding and can provide a more cohesive customer experience.
Scalability
Agencies need to be able to scale their operations up or down based on client demand. These platforms are designed to handle a large number of sites and can scale as an agency grows.
Design Flexibility
To cater to diverse client needs, agency website builders offer customisable templates and design elements. This flexibility ensures that each website can have a unique look and feel.
Integration Capabilities
They typically offer robust integration with other tools and platforms, such as CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and social media platforms, to offer a comprehensive digital solution for clients.
Client Management
These builders often include client management features, enabling agencies to set permissions, collaborate with clients, and manage multiple client websites from a single dashboard.
Code-Free Development
To speed up development and allow designers who may not have coding skills to contribute, these builders often provide code-free development environments while still allowing for custom coding when needed.
SEO and Marketing Tools
Built-in SEO and marketing tools help agencies optimise client websites for search engines and track marketing campaigns, making delivering a complete package to clients easier.
Support and Training
Continuous support and training are essential for agencies to stay updated with the latest web technologies and trends. Good agency website builders provide robust support and training resources.
How to Choose the Best Agency Website Builder for Your Company?
Choosing the best agency website builder for your company involves considering several factors to ensure the tool aligns with your business needs, client requirements, and workflow processes.
It’s important to carefully assess these factors so you can select an agency website builder that will serve your company’s needs, support efficient and collaborative work among your team members, and help you deliver high-quality websites to your clients.
Here are steps to guide you in selecting the most suitable agency website builder:
Identify Your Needs
Understanding the size and scope of the projects your team typically undertakes is your first step to evaluating the best website builder. This understanding will help in selecting a platform that aligns with your project needs. Next, assess the skill level of your team. If your team is less experienced in coding, you might prefer a user-friendly builder that requires minimal coding.
Conversely, a more complex platform might be suitable if your team possesses advanced technical skills. Additionally, consider the types of websites you frequently build and identify the features that are most crucial for your clients. This will ensure that the chosen platform can effectively support the specific requirements of your client’s projects.
Evaluate Key Features
When selecting a proficient website builder, prioritise finding one with a user-friendly interface that allows for quick adaptation by your team. It’s essential to ensure that the platform offers a wide range of design customisation options to cater to the diverse preferences of your clients.
Additionally, the platform should include collaboration tools that allow multiple team members to work on the same project simultaneously, fostering a more efficient and cohesive workflow.
Lastly, it’s crucial to review the scalability of the builder. Assess whether it can handle an increasing workload efficiently without any performance issues. This aspect is vital for managing growing project demands while maintaining quality and performance.
Consider the Cost
The pricing structure is a significant factor to take into consideration during your hunt for the best agency website builders. It’s important to make sure it aligns with your budget. It’s equally important to evaluate the cost concerning the features offered.
A more expensive option is only sometimes superior, especially if you are unlikely to use all the features it provides. Additionally, be vigilant about potential hidden costs. These could include extra fees for plugins, themes, or e-commerce functionality, which might not be apparent initially.
Considering these factors will help make a cost-effective and suitable choice for your needs.
Research the Level of Support and Training
The level of customer support that is available is crucial when it comes to evaluating agency website builders. This includes whether they offer 24/7 support, live chat options, phone support, or other forms of assistance. Alongside this, it’s crucial to identify if the platform provides ample training resources.
These resources are essential for helping your team learn and navigate the platform. Ensuring that comprehensive customer support and adequate training materials are available will contribute to a smoother experience for your team using the platform.
Look at Performance and SEO
When choosing an agency website builder, it’s imperative to ensure that it adheres to the search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices, as this greatly influences the success of your clients’ websites. Additionally, evaluating the technical performance of websites created using the platform is essential.
Among the key aspects to consider are the loading speed and how well the sites perform on mobile devices. These factors are crucial as they directly impact user experience and can affect the website’s overall effectiveness and search engine ranking.
Review the Agency’s Portfolio and Client Feedback
When assessing a website builder, examining other websites built using the platform is advisable. This examination will help you determine if the quality of these sites meets your standards. Additionally, reading client testimonials and reviews can be incredibly insightful.
It allows you to gauge the level of satisfaction other users have had with the website builder’s capabilities. This combined approach of practical evaluation and feedback assessment provides a well-rounded understanding of the platform’s efficacy and suitability for your needs.
Test the Platform
Consider using free trials or demos to gain hands-on experience with the platform before picking up a website builder for your agency. This approach allows you to test the platform’s functionalities and limitations directly. Ensuring that the builder can adequately handle your typical web design and development tasks is vital.
Engaging with the platform through trials or demos provides a practical understanding of its capabilities and helps you make an informed decision based on your specific needs and requirements.
Consider the Future
Prioritise one that boasts regular updates and the introduction of new features when scouting for the ideal website platform. This is a key indicator of a platform’s commitment to evolution and staying ahead in the game.
It’s also crucial to assess whether the platform is geared to keep pace with the ever-changing web design trends and technological advancements. Opting for a platform that stays on the cutting edge ensures that your web projects remain modern, relevant, and competitive in an ever-evolving digital world.
Security and Reliability
Before picking the best among the website builders, verifying that it has a robust security infrastructure is essential. This ensures the protection of both your data and that of your clients. Additionally, examining the provider’s uptime records is crucial for assessing the platform’s reliability.
A robust security framework and consistent uptime are vital components that guarantee the safety and accessibility of your online projects, providing peace of mind and a secure environment for your web development needs.
Best Agency Website Builders in 2023
Each of these website builders offers a unique set of features and pricing models. The best choice will depend on your agency’s needs, including the level of customisation required, the volume of client work, and your team’s expertise.
Here are some of the best website builders in 2023 that are particularly suitable for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs):
WordPress
WordPress is widely recognised as a powerful and versatile platform for agency website building, offering several key features that make it particularly appealing. WordPress provides a blend of simplicity, power, and flexibility for agencies, making it an excellent choice for creating diverse and dynamic websites for their clients.
- Customisability: WordPress is known for its extensive customisation options. Agencies can use thousands of themes and plugins to create a unique website look and functionality. This flexibility allows for the creation of websites that can range from simple blogs to complex e-commerce sites.
- User-Friendly Interface: Despite its robust functionality, WordPress maintains a user-friendly interface. This is particularly beneficial for agencies that need to onboard new staff quickly or work with clients who prefer to manage certain aspects of their websites.
- SEO-Friendly: WordPress sites are known for being SEO-friendly, which is crucial for agencies looking to improve their clients’ online visibility. The platform offers various SEO plugins and tools to optimise website content for search engines.
- Responsive Design: With mobile usage increasingly dominating web traffic, the responsiveness of WordPress themes ensures that websites look and function well across all devices, which is essential for maintaining a professional online presence.
- Regular Updates: WordPress frequently updates its platform, ensuring security, introducing new features, and staying up-to-date with the latest web standards.
- E-Commerce Integration: For agencies building online stores, WordPress offers seamless integration with WooCommerce, a powerful e-commerce plugin, allowing for the creation of a fully functional online store.
- Content Management: WordPress excels as a content management system (CMS in allowing users to easily manage and update their website content, which is essential for agencies that handle content-heavy sites.
- Security Features: While WordPress is a target for hackers due to its popularity, the platform offers robust security features and plugins to safeguard websites against common vulnerabilities.
Wix
Known for its drag-and-drop functionality, Wix is favoured for its simplicity combined with numerous features, making it suitable for businesses of various types. Wix offers a suite of tools and features particularly beneficial for agencies and freelancers.
These features highlight Wix’s commitment to innovation and its aim to provide agency users with a comprehensive, efficient, and collaborative web design and development environment.
- AI-powered Web Creation: Wix Studio, their AI-powered platform, provides advanced design features and code-free animations, enabling agencies to build sophisticated websites efficiently.
- Comprehensive Dashboard: The platform includes a workspace dashboard that acts as a central hub for managing multiple projects, clients, and teams, streamlining workflow and communication.
- Custom Roles and Permissions: Agencies can personalise the process by setting up custom roles and permissions for clients, allowing for collaborative and controlled content updates and feedback directly on the canvas.
- App Market Opportunity: Wix Studio offers a Blocks workspace where agencies can build and monetise apps on Wix’s app market, accessing a vast potential customer base.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy Pro offers features that can be very beneficial for agencies. These features align with agencies looking for efficiency, centralised management, security, and client collaboration in their website-building platform.
- Time-Saving Management Tools: It provides free tools designed to save time managing sites, clients, and projects, expanding the possibilities for web design and development businesses.
- Centralised Dashboard: GoDaddy Pro’s dashboard enables site and client management from one location, including delegated access to act on behalf of clients and the ability to update multiple sites simultaneously, no matter where they are hosted.
- Security: Security scans powered by Sucuri ensure the safety and integrity of client sites.
- Performance Insights: The platform offers tools to run checks for insights into site performance, helping to maintain optimal functionality.
- Client Collaboration: Agencies can collaborate using a shared shopping cart, simplifying the purchasing process for additional services or products.
In essence, agency website builders are comprehensive solutions designed to handle the multifaceted nature of agency work, from design and development to collaboration and client management, all within one platform. This enables agencies to deliver high-quality websites that meet the varying needs of their clients while also managing their business operations effectively.