How to choose the best website builder for your marketing agency
If you’re trying to scale your marketing agency, you know that part of the challenge is delivering the same quality on which you built your reputation even as your client list grows. It’s one thing to nail the client brief and design pitch when you only have one or two websites on the go, but what about when you have dozens? An excellent website builder can drastically speed up and simplify the process of completing each website while giving you and your clients tools for maintaining the site effortlessly long term.
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There are plenty of website builders out there to choose from. That’s why we’ve created this roundup to give you an overview of some top options on the market while providing some pointers for picking the best website builder for your marketing agency.
Why should agencies use website builders?
Before diving into some website builder criteria, and the different builders on the market, let’s get clear on why you might want to incorporate the use of a website builder in your agency’s workflow. Maybe you’ve been getting by just fine without one, and you see them as more of a beginner tool rather than something for experienced developers.
The truth is, website builders have come a long way in recent years. They’re not just for people who have never written a line of code. Instead, many are packed with sophisticated features that help professional developers do their jobs faster, better, and with greater ease. Let’s take a look at the benefits your agency can see from using a website builder.
Efficiency
Rather than starting every project from scratch, website builders enable designers and developers to bring their vision to life in a fraction of the time it would normally take to create a site. The best website builders for marketing agencies come with purpose-built templates that can easily be customized to meet the client's brief. Even if you want to start with a completely blank page, putting together the different sections of a website using drag-and-drop elements is far more efficient than coding everything. You can still incorporate code for more complex parts of your websites, so you can maximize both efficiency and design.
Provide all-in-one solutions
The best website builders for digital marketing agencies managing multiple websites offer more than just the ability to create a website: they include hosting, website domain management, site management tools, and integrations with other services you might offer as a digital agency. This saves your agency the need to separately purchase and integrate a bunch of different solutions: with the right website builder, you’ll have access to a suite of solutions that help you run your business with ease.
Cost-effectiveness
Development time is expensive, but with a website builder, it can be cut down dramatically. Simple websites can be ready to go live in just a few hours, while complex websites can be created in a fraction of the time they would normally take to build. As powerful as many of the best website builders for marketing agencies are, they’re generally accessibly priced.
Responsive website creation
Mobile responsiveness is more important than ever, with a huge amount of internet traffic now taking place on mobile devices. For your client websites to be successful and produce conversions, they need to be fully mobile-friendly and responsive. This isn’t only important from a user experience (UX) perspective, but also from an SEO perspective, since Google considers mobile responsiveness a direct ranking factor (Search Engine Journal).
The best responsive website builders have tools that make mobile-friendly design a breeze, which can save developers the time and headache of ensuring every part of their projects looks great regardless of the device it’s being used on.
What makes a good website builder?
A good website builder comes down to a few key elements: ease of use, excellent security, flexibility, performance, ecommerce functionality, and support.
Ease of use
The best website builder for marketing agencies needs to be highly usable, even by those with little to no web design and development experience. Not only will your in-house team potentially be using the builder, but if you’re a SaaS reseller, you might want to white-label and resell your website builder to clients who want to create their websites themselves.
That’s why it’s so important to choose a user-friendly option: it will provide your agency with the most flexibility in terms of delivering managed website services to different clients with varying budgets. Big-budget clients may pay to have your agency create their website, while clients with smaller budgets may prefer a DIY solution made possible by your white-label website builder. To adequately serve both these clients, an easy-to-use website builder is key.
Excellent security
Cyberattacks are a serious risk faced by small businesses, and the right website builder can provide significant protection. Website builders that come with trusted, high-quality hosting for agencies, SSL certificates, and other security measures can give both you and your clients the peace of mind that bad actors will have a hard time attacking their site.
This may not seem like the most important factor when picking a website builder, but it’s essential to keep it in mind. If your clients suffer an attack and have their business or client data such as credit card info or login credentials compromised, they can face serious repercussions. The best website builders for marketing agencies will take this into account.
Flexibility
Flexibility in a website builder refers to the ability to bring any client website brief to life, from the most basic static website to the most advanced, interactive project. The best website builder for a marketing agency will balance beginner-friendly drag-and-drop elements with the ability to customize as needed with code.
Performance
It doesn’t matter how good a website looks if it doesn’t perform well, and a good website builder should be able to create websites that perform well across all the metrics that matter, such as:
- Speed and loading times
- SEO performance
- Image and video optimization
- DNS lookup time
This is an area that can produce some concern in website-builder skeptics: in the past, website builders have been known to create clunkier websites that are slow to load, dramatically reducing website performance. Today, this isn’t the case, with the best website builders for marketing agencies producing speedy websites with ease.
Ecommerce functionality
Even if don’t tend to work with ecommerce clients, it’s best to use a website builder that has built-in ecommerce functionality. Businesses that aren’t primarily retailers may still want to add some kind of ecommerce offering down the link, and if your builder can already handle that, you won’t have to look for a separate solution or deal with clunky integrations to make it happen.
Support
If something goes wrong with a client's website, the last thing you want is to have to wait for the next day (or worse, next week), for support to become available. To maintain your hard-earned reputation, it’s important to be able to resolve issues as fast as possible. That’s why a website builder with 24/7 support is key to maintaining a high level of customer service as a marketing agency.
Choosing an agency website builder: key considerations
Given the important features of a good website builder we just discussed, here are the key considerations to keep in mind when choosing the best website builder for your marketing agency. You can use this as a checklist to make sure you’ll have all the features you’ll need to get the most out of your builder.
- Features: Your website builder should offer a wide range of features to meet the agency's specific needs. This includes support for ecommerce, responsive design, SEO, and reporting.
- Customizability: Look for an excellent drag-and-drop interface that also has flexibility for more advanced designs that may require custom code or integration with third-party plugins.
- Multi-website management tools: Your builder should go beyond just offering the ability to create websites, it should also give you the tools to manage a long list of client websites as you scale your agency.
- Powerful and secure hosting: Reliable built-in hosting will deliver fast, safe websites for your clients, and eliminate the need to deal with a separate hosting provider. They’ll also ensure your clients can handle high traffic and other demand without compromising performance.
- Integration with other tools: The best website builder for your marketing agency will integrate with other reseller solutions in your portfolio, giving you the ability to become a one-stop shop for your clients.
- Easy-to-use interface: An intuitive interface is a must, both for simplifying the process of creating websites in-house and for giving clients the tools to create their websites if you’re a white-label reseller.
- White-label solutions: Whether you intend to rebrand a white-label website builder or to use white-label service providers to create and manage websites on your behalf, white-label solutions can dramatically help you scale your agency.
- Mobile and SEO optimization: These are interrelated, and the best website builder for your marketing agency will provide ample tools to ensure all your websites are mobile-friendly and SEO optimized. The best websites for SEO have appropriate keywords, header tags, alt text, meta descriptions, mobile responsiveness, and UX design.
Top website builders for marketing agencies
Now that you know what to look for in a website builder, here are some of the top website builders for marketing agencies available on the market.
Vendasta Website Pro
Vendasta’s Website Pro is a complete website building and management solution that includes a powerful website builder, security backed by the most trusted tech company in the world, simplified web hosting, and one-click ecommerce setup.
Website Pro can be used to create WordPress websites that are hosted on the Google Cloud Platform, which means they’ll have all the benefits of the most up-to-date hosting infrastructure in the game: lightning speed, effortless scaling, and world-class security.
A range of vertical-specific templates gives you a shortcut to building just about any kind of client website, no matter what nice or industry they operate in. With Divi Builder built-in, you can further customize every part of your projects to that they’re always pixel-perfect.
Beyond the website building and hosting features, Website Pro is purpose-built for digital marketing agencies. This means it has built-in solutions that tackle all the most common challenges agencies face when it comes to managing a growing list of sites. Through the admin dashboard, you can see all your projects at a glance, make updates, and navigate to their WordPress dashboard with a click. The convenience of the admin dashboard lets you manage projects without having to waste time logging in and out of different accounts.
Who’s Website Pro for?
Website Pro is the best website builder for digital marketing agencies offering any kind of website services. Since it’s completely rebrandable, you can resell it as a DIY website-building solution. It also gives you all the tools you need to scale your web design and development services, and you can even access Vendasta’s white-label marketing experts to further scale your offering without the need to hire in-house.
Wix
Wix is a website builder that can be used to design and create all kinds of sites. It features a drag-and-drop web design interface that can be used to create layouts from scratch. If you want to speed up the web design process, there’s also a huge selection of templates to use a starting point. These are editable, allowing users to change them as needed to get a customized final product.
Wix also incorporates their proprietary Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI), an AI-powered tool that enables users to input their design and functionality preferences and generates a professional-looking website based on these inputs. Then, users can toggle back to the Wiz Editor to further change the AI-generated websites.
Users can add ecommerce functionality and connect a range of third-party plugins to give their websites more functionality.
Who’s Wix for?
Wix is great for businesses looking for a DIY solution to website building, since it enables inexperienced users to create an attractive website with limited budget and resources. However, more experienced website managers and sellers looking for manage a high volume of websites, and need more advanced SEO features, may need to find other alternatives to Wix to fit their needs.
Squarespace
Squarespace started as a portfolio-building website for artists and creatives and has since expanded to be usable for all kinds of websites. Today, it can be used to host and create websites for any kind of business, including ecommerce businesses. It still caters to its original clientele, with a wide range of templates for portfolios and CVs in addition to online stores, local businesses, blogs, service-based businesses, and more.
Who’s Squarespace for?
Squarespace is a good choice for creatives or small businesses looking for a DIY website solution. However, it’s best for those who don’t need a wide range of payment gateways or many third-party plugins since these are more limited on Squarespace compared to other website builders.
Weebly
Weebly is a website builder owned by the popular payment processing platform Square. It includes a drag-and-drop builder, the ability to create attractive scroll animations like parallax and reveal, a range of templates from both non-ecommerce and ecommerce websites, and the ability for more advanced users to customize their site with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Who’s Weebly for?
Weebly is a good choice for website creators and other small businesses already using square payment processing terminals to create websites even if they don’t have design or development experience, since their site will automatically be integrated with their in-person payment processing solution.
Webflow
Webflow is a no-code website builder that uses a visual canvas to create attractive, responsive websites easily. Its visual design solution automatically generates clean code for fast, nimble websites that can easily be further customized with custom code. A wide portfolio of templates is available as a starting point, while the intuitive editor provides granular control over all parts of a website’s design.
Who’s Webflow for?
Webflow is for professional designers who want to cut down their design and development time. It may not be the best choice for less experienced designers, since despite having a visual builder, it has more of a learning curve than other options.
Duda
Duda is a professional website builder that includes automated workflows and dynamic page creation, made to help designers complete their projects faster. It includes many templates that can help designers and businesses get started quickly, and customizability options to make the templates feel more personalized.
Who’s Duda for?
Since it doesn’t have the granular customizability of other options, Duda may be worth it for those who want an attractive plug-and-play template to get their website up and running quickly.
SimplePractice
SimplePractice is a website builder and practice management software for private health practices such as dietitians, psychologists, and social workers. Since it includes electronic health record (EHR) management, it can help professionals in these fields set up a website that’s tailored to their needs quickly. This includes the ability to set up a client portal, appointment booking, and telehealth appointments.
Who’s SimplePractice for?
SimplePractice is for professionals with private practices who want to set up a website with the features they need to run their practice. It isn’t the most customizable builder on the market, so it’s most ideal for those who are looking for a simple, straightforward solution.
Shopify
Shopify is a website hosting and building platform geared specifically to ecommerce businesses. Many templates are available directly through Shopify, and thousands more can be purchased from third-party template designers. It doesn’t have a drag-and-drop website builder, so creating custom websites on Shopify requires knowledge of its proprietary language, Liquid.
A vast library of plugins means users can add all kinds of functionality to their ecommerce websites.
Who’s Shopify for?
Shopify is best for businesses looking for a DIY ecommerce website solution and who don’t want to mess around with a drag-and-drop builder, preferring to use ready-made customizable templates.
Jimdo
Jimdo is an editable website creator with ecommerce functionality. Users can start with a template or use Jimdo Dolphin, the company’s built-in ADI solution, to create a website. All websites created with Jimdo are mobile-responsive, giving designers peace of mind.
It’s more limited in features and customization than other options on the market and lacks some key SEO and other features that might be important to SMBs.
Who’s Jimdo for?
Jimdo is for small businesses, professionals, and individuals who would like to quickly and inexpensively set up a website, but who don’t need robust features to drive conversions on their site.
The best website builder for a marketing agency: Website Pro
There are a lot of website builder options on the market, and while some are well-suited to DIY businesses, the best choice for marketing agencies is clear: Website Pro. That’s because it doesn’t just get an A+ on the web design front, but also delivers in key ways that make it easy for agencies to manage their client projects at scale.
Google Cloud hosting
Delivering secure, fast websites is essential if you want to establish a positive reputation as a web design agency. Thanks to Google Cloud hosting and free SSL certificates, every website you create with Website Pro will be safe and fast, with no risk of downtime.
Flexibility of WordPress
There’s a reason around 43% of the websites on the internet are built on WordPress: it’s an excellent, flexible, trusted, and feature-rich CMS (w3techs). Website Pro creates websites on WordPress, giving you access to the thousands of plugins and other solutions available on the platform, and the confidence that your projects are built on a platform that isn’t going to disappear in a few years.
WooCommerce integration
One-click WooCommerce integration means you can turn any website into an online store with ease. Whether you’re creating ecommerce sites with vast, complicated catalogs, or simpler websites for businesses that just want to sell one or two products, it can all be done using Website Pro.
Admin dashboard
Whether you have 10 clients or 1000, you can quickly filter to see which websites need attention, and manage all your updates in a few clicks.
Frequently asked questions
How much do agencies charge to build a website?
Agencies can charge anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars to build a website, depending on their niche and the complexity of the website being built.
Is it worth hiring someone to build a website?
Yes, it’s usually worth hiring someone or an agency to build a website. Even though many DIY website builders exist, an experienced agency or designer can ensure that everything runs properly and looks on-brand.