Unlocking the benefits of WordPress white labeling: Tips and best practices
The web design and development world has changed dramatically in recent years, with powerful solutions making it possible to create beautiful, functional websites in a fraction of the time it once took.
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In a busy marketplace full of different WordPress white label solutions, we’ll help you understand exactly what to look for when choosing the perfect fit for your agency. In this article, you’ll find actionable tips to help you set up your white label website projects. Additionally, we’ll provide insights into how to land more clients and scale your business, and share the best WordPress white label agency solution on the market.
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Key considerations when choosing a white-label WordPress solution
If you’re just starting to research WordPress white label solutions, it can be easy to get bogged down in different claims and features. Let’s cut through the noise and zero in on the most important things to consider as a website services provider.
1. Customization options
While there are lots of WordPress website builders out there, few of them give you the total control to customize the interface that your clients will interact with. Look for a solution that enables you to pick exactly what your website client sees and has control over.
This goes well beyond simple rebrandabiltiy. While it’s nice to rebrand a website building tool with your agency’s logo and colors, a truly customizable WordPress white label solution will also give you the ability to craft a custom dashboard. This can give you more granular control over the client experience.
2. Support and maintenance
Support and maintenance may not seem like the most exciting, headline-grabbing features of a WordPress white label solution, but trust us on this one: it’s one of the features you will be most grateful for as you sign more clients and scale your agency.
WordPress is constantly changing and receiving new updates, so any solution that doesn’t prioritize regular updates and maintenance is more likely to produce snags, bugs, incompatibilities, and other issues that can impact your clients’ sites.
Having a reliable, 24/7 white-label WordPress support to get things back up and running smoothly will make all the difference between a happy or a frustrated client. That’s especially the case if something does go awry, like a plugin update accidentally causing part of a website to break.
3. Pricing
Your WordPress white label solution should have a transparent, easy-to-understand pricing structure. This enables you to understand your costs, so you can make sure the website design pricing you determine for your clients leaves enough room for you to hit your target profit margins.
As a WordPress white label agency, this doesn’t necessarily mean opting for the cheapest website solution on the market. Instead, look for one that checks off all of your requirements in terms of features, while still allowing you to be competitive.
Another important consideration to keep in mind as you choose a white-label platform for your website services is whether discounts are available as you scale. Look for an option that offers you favorable wholesale pricing as your WordPress white label agency grows and you sign on more clients.
4. User interface
Your website solution’s interface should be user-friendly and highly functional, both for you and for your clients. This ensures that it can be flexible enough to meet the demands of a wide range of client projects, including:
- Websites that are fully created and managed in-house by your agency.
- Straightforward WordPress white label solution reselling, where clients with more limited budgets create and manage their websites themselves.
- Projects that fall somewhere in between, with clients handling some aspects of updating and managing their websites.
Essential tips for setting up a white-label WordPress website
Once you’ve selected a solution for creating and hosting white-label WordPress websites, it helps to have a standard operating procedure (SOP) in place that you can follow with each new client project. This ensures that nothing important falls between the cracks, and makes it possible for your agency to deliver the same high-quality experience regardless of who owns each particular client account.
Build these tips into your SOP to make sure they’re covered for every website project.
Customize the WordPress dashboard
The standard WordPress admin dashboard will be familiar to you if you’ve ever created or maintained a WordPress site, but to those with less experience, it isn’t exactly the slickest user interface on the internet today:
Plus, as you add more plugins and other features, that side menu can quickly become lengthy and cluttered, with many items containing future sub-menus when you click them. This isn’t an issue for a seasoned web developer, but customizing the dashboard for your clients will make it far more user-friendly.
When using Website Pro, for example, the first interface clients see is much cleaner and less cluttered, and you can customize it to determine what they see.
Then, you can further customize the standard WordPress dashboard to make it less cluttered and more intuitive, leaving only the widgets that your clients will be able to comfortably use.
Add your agency branding
Every time your clients see your agency branding integrated with the tools they use, it reinforces your agency as an important and valued provider of digital solutions. By rebranding your website building and management tool to look like it’s a proprietary piece of software unique to your agency, you strengthen your brand and reduce the likelihood of clients shopping around for better pricing for the same solution.
Website Pro is fully rebrandable, which means that anywhere the Website Pro logo appears you can replace it with your agency’s logo. You can also change the colors to reflect your brand palette and create an immersive brand experience all your own.
Install necessary plugins
One of the best parts of using a white-label CMS for WordPress rather than some other platform is that WordPress provides access to a seemingly endless variety of plugins. Since it's an open-source CMS, anyone can make and sell plugins to fulfill just about any function you might want to incorporate into your website.
You don’t necessarily want to go overboard with plugins for your white label web design WordPress projects. This can increase the risk of bugs, vulnerabilities, and slow loading speeds, but a few well-chosen plugins can be very handy both for you and for your clients. These can be used to impact the front end of a client's website or to add functionality and features to the back end, making it easier for them to run their businesses.
Create a custom login URL
WordPress creates an automatic login URL, which is just the website domain name followed by /wp-admin. This takes users to the login screen where they can enter their username—typically an email address—and password. While this works just fine, a good best practice is to create a custom login URL.
Why? Firstly, it can be another one of those little touches that sets your WordPress white-label agency apart from the competition by showing extra care and consideration. But more importantly, it’s a security measure. Avoiding the standard login URL means hackers can’t immediately access the login page and slow down the site with constant automated login attempts.
Tips for marketing your white-label WordPress websites to clients
It seems like everyone and their grandmother has a website nowadays, which is great news for you as a provider of white label web design WordPress services. Whatever your niche is, your clients certainly require website services. Even if they have already had a professional website built, it’s not uncommon to require a refresh every couple of years. Here’s how you can make sure your agency sells more to local businesses.
1. Define your target market
One of the first rules of marketing 101 applies as much to selling websites as it does anywhere else: it’s easier to sell when you know your customer, rather than trying to sell to everyone at once. If your clients tend to be restaurants, hone in on those and make sure your portfolio, marketing materials, and communications are all crafted to appeal to food service businesses.
2. Emphasize the benefits of your white-label solution
As a WordPress white label agency, you can fully customize the solution you sell your clients. Emphasize the benefits of your solution over the competition, such as:
- An interface with a better UX
- Fully managed hosting and website updates
- Automatic daily backups
- Superior built-in analytics
3. Have an online presence
Your prospects want to see that you know your stuff when it comes to websites, so having an impressive website yourself can help you move more clients toward closing. Having an online presence elsewhere, like on social media channels, can further legitimate your agency in the eyes of prospective clients, establishing you as a valuable voice in your niche.
4. Demonstrate your expertise
It’s always more effective to show than tell. A portfolio of beautiful websites will lead to more conversions than a lengthy, wordy website that explains everything you can do for clients. While a description of your services is perfectly warranted, take the time to build up an attractive portfolio as well. If you’re new to selling website services, consider creating a few dummy small business websites to showcase your skills.
Website Pro: The best solution for hosting white-label WordPress websites
We’ve covered a lot of ground in terms of what to look for in a WordPress white-label solution, but if you want to save yourself the legwork of trying different platforms, the choice is easy. Website Pro is created with the needs of agencies in mind, so it’s packed with all the features and functionality that you need to be successful:
- An easy-to-use platform: Whether you’re a seasoned web development pro or your talents lie more on the sales side of things, Vendasta’s Website Pro platform is easy and intuitive to work with. Once you’re set up, you’ll be surprised at just how simple it is to create, manage, and white-label WordPress websites for your clients. The Website Admin Dashboard lets you manage large numbers of websites easily, all from a single page.
- Robust features: Website Pro is completely brandable, and includes the features that matter most to agencies. Features like automatic daily backups, 24/7 customer support, safe, secure hosting on the Google Cloud Platform, and management tools enable you to manage hundreds of websites easily and with little time commitment. Everything you need to deliver attractive and highly functional websites and manage them is included in this WordPress white label solution.
- Effortless scalability: Whether your clients are tiny start-ups, thriving enterprises, or somewhere in between, the Google hosting included in Website Pro is up to the task. Be a part of your client’s success by helping them scale their sites effortlessly, rather than worrying about performance issues that other hosting providers experience in response to traffic spikes.
- Cost-effectiveness: You only pay for Website Pro when you make a sale, so you don’t have to worry about up-front software fees that can cut into your profits before you even get a chance to land clients. Plus, as you grow, you’ll get access to better wholesale pricing that gives you an even larger cushion of profit margin.
- Integration with other Vendasta tools: Through the Vendasta marketplace, you can access a whole suite of digital solutions to resell your clients, including reputation management, digital advertising, SEO, booking software, and more. All of these are designed to integrate easily with Website Pro, so you can provide a complete portfolio of digital marketing solutions that work together to maximize your clients’ ROI.
- Access to white-label experts: Outsource web design and development to white-label experts working under your agency’s banner, so you can scale without having to hire in-house.
Frequently asked questions
Are there any plugins that can help white label a WordPress site?
Yes, plugins are available that can help white label a WordPress site. These plugins enable users to replace the WordPress logo with their logo, change the colors of the WordPress dashboard, and change which parts of the dashboard are visible to clients. This can help make the WordPress dashboard less cluttered and more user-friendly.
Are there any drawbacks to white-labeling a WordPress site for clients?
For clients who are already familiar with WordPress, it is possible that white-labeling a WordPress site can leave them with less functionality than they are accustomed to. White-labeling generally enables service providers to make WordPress more user-friendly, but advanced clients may prefer not to sacrifice functionality for user-friendliness.