How to Choose a WordPress Development Agency to Scale Your Projects?

When your agency starts to scale, you may decide that a big part of your expansion will be providing WordPress services. If that’s the case but you don’t have an in-house WordPress team, it’s essential to choose an experienced team to outsource WordPress-related tasks as you expand operations.

In this article, we’ll explore 10 strategies you can use to choose the right WordPress team to help you scale your operations.

Key Takeaways

• The best way to find the right outsourcing partner for your business is to carefully examine their experience, reputation with past clients, availability, approach to client relationships, technical knowledge on development and SEO, and the cost and value of their services.

Is Your Agency Ready for Scaling?

This is a question that only you can answer based on how much your revenue is growing compared to the resources needed to sustain your agency.

Whether your agency is growing comes down to whether it is able to increase revenue while cost-effectively managing the resources needed for this growth.

This means that your revenue increases, but the resources your company needs to sustain itself increase at a slower rate. An increase in efficiency.

Again, only you can determine whether this is happening, but here are a few questions to ask yourself to determine whether your agency is ready for scaling.

Here they are:

• Do you have a product-market fit? A study found that 35% of companies fail because they provide a service or product that no one wants or needs.
• Do you have the right talent to scale? 45% of worldwide employers have difficulty finding the right talent for their roles. Ensure you have the skills necessary to scale.
• Do you have a solid process to get new clients?
• Do you have a long-term roadmap for your future operations?
• Do you have the cash to hire more people and purchase the equipment necessary to scale?
• Are you (at least partially) automating repetitive tasks to reduce costs while maintaining the quality of your service?
• Are your processes streamlined enough to handle the influx of new team members as you expand operations?

Answering these questions will allow you to determine whether you are indeed scaling and take you to the next step: outsourcing WordPress work to help you in the process.

10 Things to Consider When Choosing a WordPress Agency to Scale Your Projects

If your agency is scaling or ready to scale and you’re planning on outsourcing your WordPress-related tasks, these are the main factors to consider when choosing your partner.

Experience and Reputation

One of the most important factors when choosing a WordPress agency to outsource development is their experience. Look for companies that have 5+ years of experience.

To probe their experience, ask questions like:

• Can you explain some examples of WordPress projects you have completed for other clients?
• Have you worked with businesses in our industry before? If so, can you provide case studies or references?
• What challenges have you faced in past outsourced WordPress projects, and how did you resolve them?
• Can you describe a successful long-term outsourcing partnership you’ve had with an agency? What made it work well?
• How do you handle communication and collaboration with agencies that outsource their WordPress development to you?

In addition to their experience, their reputation among previous clients tells you a lot about their results and approach. Platforms like Clutch, Trustpilot, and DesignRush provide reviews from past clients.

Extensively read reviews for every partner you’re currently considering and look for specific details about how they communicate and treat outsourcing clients throughout development.

Portfolio

Consider their portfolio, too. All reputable WordPress development agencies will provide an online portfolio or a list of case studies from past clients. These resources will further help you understand how they operate and determine whether they have the experience you need.

These case studies generally provide more in-depth information about their methods than online reviews, so they’re a great resource.

Approach to Clients

Different WordPress agencies have different approaches to clients. For example, some agencies focus mostly on clients who have already created the website’s designs, while others are also open to designing sites from scratch.

The agency’s site should have information about their approach to clients and the projects they usually focus on. But if this information is missing or not specific enough, you should discuss it with a representative as you explore their services.

Availability

Your potential partner’s size influences how they communicate with clients and potential clients. On smaller agencies, you’ll likely communicate directly with the founders for preliminary meetings and project updates.

On larger agencies that are always handling multiple simultaneous projects, you’re more likely to communicate with project managers or a similar representative. These larger agencies will provide more project availability, but their communications representative will likely be farther from the higher-ups.

In contrast, in smaller agencies, the founders will likely be more involved in every project. Given their size, they may only be available for new projects if they themselves expand alongside your operations and team.

Neither is good or bad. Companies can provide excellent services if their team is up to the task and there are enough team members to go around. The size of the team depends on the needs of your project.

Whether They Use Site Builders

Some WordPress developers and agencies use plugins known as site builders, such as Beaver Builder or Elementor. These plugins allow non-technical developers to create websites with customizable drag-and-drop interfaces.

There are a few advantages to building a site with site builder plugins, including being budget-friendly and faster to build.

However, they have pitfalls such as having less control over the website’s code, suffering from potentially lower performance due to the extra JS code, and experiencing scalability issues (making it harder for the site to grow while maintaining performance and stability).

Depending on your client’s needs, your partner using site builders may or may not be a good idea.

For small projects, they may not be all that bad. However, on larger projects requiring many custom features, site builders are 100% a no-no.

Range of Services

Reputable WordPress development partners offer a wide range of services. Ask about any services that may be relevant to your project, such as custom theme or plugin development, integration with external services, optimizing performance, etc.

The more services a WordPress agency provides, the more WordPress services you can provide to your own clients.

Communication and Commitment to Transparency

Needless to say, a WordPress outsourcing partner should be an expert communicator and completely committed to transparency.

However, determining an agency’s approach to communication takes talking to them and exploring their practices. Some questions to ask to figure out their approach are:

• Who will be our team’s point of contact? Do you have a dedicated project manager per project?
• What communication tools do you use (email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.)?
• How available would your team be to impromptu video calls?
• How will my team keep track of progress on the project?
• How will my team provide feedback?

Technical Knowledge and Experience Scaling WordPress Sites

The fact that your agency is scaling doesn’t mean that the projects you undertake must scale at the same time. However, the partner you choose has to be ready for projects to get big, and for that, they need to have previous experience scaling WordPress sites.

Most WordPress sites use plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. On the other hand, some agencies use frameworks like Next.js, Gatsby, and Astro, depending on their methods and the needs of the client.

To understand their approach to and experience with scalability, ask the following questions:

• Can you share examples of WordPress sites you’ve scaled to handle high traffic and large content volumes?
• What strategies have you used to optimize WordPress performance for sites that are planned to get bigger?
• How do you handle scaling WooCommerce sites to ensure fast load times and smooth performance during high traffic spikes?
• What security measures do you implement to ensure a growing WordPress site remains secure against attacks and downtime risks?

SEO Knowledge

SEO is extremely important to ensuring your clients’ sites receive the traffic they need to sustain the business. Ask a potential outsourcing partner about their SEO practices to understand their approach.

Examples of SEO best practices they may implement include:

• Structuring headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) so that a lower-level heading is never outside of its corresponding higher-level parent.
• A highly organized, well-configured sitemap.
• Meaningful, search engine and human-readable URLs.
• Rendering methods for buttons, headings, and images that result in highly structured semantic HTML.
• Keyboard accessibility features.
• Call to action (CTA) buttons that include fields related to SEO and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The more examples they can provide and the better explained each example is, the better.

Cost and Value

Ask for a quote when you’ve found a WordPress agency that meets your needs. Based on the response, you need to determine how their costs compare to the other agencies you’ve received quotes from.

If you have multiple quotes at various price ranges, choosing the one that costs the least may be tempting. However, you also need to consider the value of each of their propositions.

A more expensive project from a very experienced agency may provide more value for your website or a more scalable foundation for future growth for your client.

You need to balance cost-effectiveness with the value they provide for your website. Ultimately, you know your budget better than anyone else and are in the best position to determine whether an investment will be worth it.

Choose the Right WordPress Outsourcing Partner for Your Growth

As your agency scales and you expand your WordPress-related projects, you need a team that is ready to tackle the challenges that come with these new projects.

Finding that team can be challenging, but with the 10 recommendations we provided here, you should be able to sift through your options and find the right partner for your growth.

If you found this useful and are looking for a WordPress partner, we encourage you to explore our services! Over the past decade, we’ve built hundreds of WordPress sites and collaborated with top global agencies and individual clients, resulting in a Clutch review score of 4.9 out of 5.

Don’t settle for a one-size-fits-all solution. Contact us today for a free consultation, and let’s talk about how we can take your projects to the next level.

You can also read our blog and developer resources for more WordPress insights!