What Is a White Label WordPress Development Agency?

A white label WordPress development agency is a company of WordPress developers, QA analysts, and project managers who provide outsourced services to digital agencies that lack a development team.

Importantly, the WordPress team remains invisible to the final client, who believes the intermediary digital agency is doing all the development work.

In this article, we’ll break down everything you need to know about white label WordPress development agencies and how to choose the right one for your project.

Key Takeaways

• White label WordPress development agencies provide WordPress services to digital agencies while remaining anonymous to the final client.
• White label agencies allow digital agencies to expand their services without creating an in-house development team.
• Choosing the right white label WordPress agency comes down to factors like experience, technical skills, range of services, and the cost of hiring them.

What is White Label WordPress Development?

White label WordPress development is outsourcing WordPress development work to a third party who builds websites under your agency’s brand. Most of the time, your clients are unaware of the fact that your agency is not the one developing the website.

Essentially, white label development is an agreement between a digital agency that procured a client and a WordPress development team who builds a website for said client.

In these agreements, your agency stays in contact with the client while the external team handles the development and provides regular updates, which you then relay to the client.

This allows you to offer high-quality WordPress services (in addition to the rest of your services) without the need for in-house developers.

Why Hire a White Label WordPress Agency?

The main reasons to hire WordPress developers under a white label agreement are the following:

• It allows you to expand your services to clients without hiring full-time staff.
• You can focus on your strengths, such as marketing and web design, while relying on WordPress experts to turn your plans into a reality.
• Experienced developers allow you to complete projects quicker than if you had set up an in-house team and started figuring out the processes by yourself.
• Since you’re outsourcing the work to professionals, you have the confidence of a high-quality final deliverable to your client.
• You can scale the size of your WordPress development partner team depending on client needs.

In summary, the reasons to hire a white label WordPress developer boil down to accessing expert talent without the cost of expanding your in-house team.

This access to expert talent allows you to gain clients who need development services without having to provide those services yourself.

How Does the Relationship Between Agencies and Third-Party Developers Work?

In our experience with white label WordPress development, the companies that seek outsourcing partners are mostly digital agencies that provide marketing and design services but don’t have a web development team.

These agencies enter contracts with their clients that include design, development, and sometimes other services.

To fulfill the development responsibilities they signed on to, they seek WordPress development partners like us. Often, the digital agency has already designed the site and shares these client-approved designs with the developers so they can turn them into a functioning website.

To the final client, the outsourced third party developing the website doesn’t exist, but in the background, they are the ones who create the site and send updates to the actual agency the client hired for the job.

The outsourced party doesn’t contact the client directly. Instead, the digital agency acts as an intermediary, relaying the updates their development partner gives them about the site.

This model is used throughout the project, with the final client never knowing that the developers belong to an external company.

How to Choose a WordPress White Label Development Partner?

If you plan on partnering with WordPress developers to provide their services to your clients, you should thoroughly consider your options before entering any partnership.

These are the main factors to consider when choosing a white label partner for WordPress development.

Experience and Portfolio

One of the main factors to consider is your potential partner’s reputation and past experiences. Their reputation tells you a lot about the impression they leave on clients, and platforms like Clutch, Trustpilot, and DesignRush provide reviews from these clients.

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

You also need to consider their portfolio. All reputable WordPress development agencies will provide an online portfolio or a list of case studies from past clients.

These resources will help you understand how they operate and determine whether they have the experience you need.

Never hire the first WordPress developer or agency that comes up in search results. The fact that they are at the top of the results doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good fit for your needs.

It mostly means they know how to optimize search result performance. That’s a great skill, but doesn’t give you enough information about all other aspects of your potential business relationship to “seal the deal.”

Technical Skills

Look for developers with extensive knowledge of the tools and frameworks WordPress sites can use.

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

You don’t need to become a developer to understand this, but you need to explore their methods and get them to explain why the stack they plan to use is the right choice for the job.

SEO and Performance Optimization

The agency you hire needs to be an expert in building fast sites that rank high on search engines. To gauge their approach to SEO and performance, ask questions about:

• The best practices to increase page speed and guarantee mobile responsiveness
• How they meet Core Web Vitals standards
• The specific technical measures they take to ensure the sites they build rank high on search results

Range of Services

The services your potential partners provide are important, too. The wider the service range, the more challenging projects they can take on. These are some of the services highly skilled outsourcing partners provide:

• Designing and building a WordPress website from scratch
• Developing custom themes unique to your site
• Reviewing your existing web designs and using them to develop your site’s theme
• Developing custom plugins
• Integrating sites with external services via APIs
• Redesigning sites
• Optimizing the site’s search engine rankings and performance
• Providing ongoing WordPress support and maintenance
• Developing ecommerce sites

Communication and Workflow

Good communication is extremely important during development projects, especially when you have to be the intermediary between your client and the provider.

In most projects, the WordPress agency would have a weekly meeting with the client over Meet or whichever collaboration platform they prefer (Microsoft Teams, etc.). In these meetings, the agency should:

• Cover the progress made so far in the current sprint and the project as a whole.
• Display progress on ongoing design efforts (if necessary).
• Showcase the site’s in-progress frontend.
• Walk the clients through the backend settings (WordPress’s admin dashboard).
• Explain how to edit the site, create and publish content, etc.
• And more.

However, in white label projects, you will have these meetings with your WordPress outsourcing partners and then relay the information they give you to the client. Therefore, they must have a well-established process for communicating, receiving feedback, and tracking progress.

Non-Disclousure Agreements (NDAs)

Many agencies want to keep secret the fact that a third party developed the client’s site and not themselves.

In these cases, agencies may want their outsourcing partners to sign an NDA that says they will never share their involvement in the project with anyone.

Many WordPress freelancers and agencies would be happy to sign an NDA as part of the business relationship, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Cost

Cost is one of the defining factors when choosing an outsourcing partner for white label work.

The hourly rate for WordPress development ranges from $15 to $250 per hour. This cost depends on the experience of the developers involved and the cost of living in the country where they are based.

The more experienced the developers are and the higher the cost of living in their country, the more they will charge you for their work.

We recommend that you seek offshore developers (those who live outside high-cost-of-living regions like the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, etc.) who charge somewhere in the $50 to $80 per hour range.

Choose the Right White Label WordPress Development Partner

Hiring a white label WordPress agency can significantly boost your agency’s capabilities, but choosing the right partner makes all the difference.

Considering the factors we’ve explored here (experience, technical skills, communication, etc.) will help you make the right choice.

Finally, if you’re looking for a reliable white label WordPress development partner, we’ve been part of the industry for the past decade and have worked with world-class clients like The New York Time’s Media Kit and AMC Networks.

With a Clutch review score of 4.9 out of 5, we know don’t settle for one-size-fits-all solutions. Contact us today for a free consultation about how we can take your WordPress project to the next level.