How to Find the Right White Label Website Builder for Your Agency
Web design agencies face a lot of obstacles in closing the deal with new clients. One of the most common ones is the argument that business owners make:
“Why do I need to pay you to build my website when I can just do it myself?”
White labeling your website builder would be one way to close that argument, but that’s not the only reason agencies should be white labeling their website builder platform. The right white label solutions can boost brand awareness, productivity, and profitability, among other things.
How exactly do you know what the right one is?
Below we’ll look at 11 features that your white label website builder should include if you want to maximize your results.
What is a white label website builder?
A white label website builder is basically a website builder that digital agencies can customize with their own branding and offer it to their customers as their own website and product.
Using a white label website builder enables agencies to focus on growing their business while offering website-building services to their customers without investing in building their own platform.
Typically with website builders, their branding is everywhere. The top-left corner has their logo. The domain name is theirs. Even the email notifications that come from the builder are branded.
A white label website builder, on the other hand, gives agencies the ability to mask the builder’s branding and replace it with their own logo and visual branding. There are a number of advantages to doing this.
What features should you look for in a white label website builder?
While the basic concept of white labeling holds true across website builders, it’s not always implemented the same way. So finding a website builder that includes the right white label features for your agency is critical.
This means you’ll need to examine the white label functionality as well as the website builder when choosing which one to use.
Here are all the features to consider as you search for the perfect white label website builder for your agency:
1. Website builder rebranding
Start by looking for a website builder that enables you to transform the user interface into one that’s fully branded to your agency. The goal isn’t just to cover up the logo in the top toolbar. You should be able to mask all of the builder’s branding.
For instance, with Brizy Cloud, you can change the builder name, add a custom logo, switch the Support and About links to your own, add custom domain names & more.
You can also customize the visual branding on the login screen as well as in the email notifications that go out to your clients from the website builder. For instance, after a new client signs up or you create an account for them, they’ll see your agency’s name and branding in the emails sent by the platform.
This will enable you to present the website builder technology as your own.
When it comes to Brizy Cloud, in particular, we’ll complete this entire process for you. Over the course of several days, we’ll talk to you about your business, its goals, and gather all the information we need to visually rebrand the website builder for your agency.
Another area of the builder that can be masked is the URL. You can do this at the dashboard level as well as the editor level.
With Brizy, your clients wouldn’t see the brizy.cloud domain anywhere inside your website builder. Instead, they’d see your agency’s name (or whatever you wanted to call your builder). In this example, our custom domain is called “Eunixa”.
Replacing the builder’s branding with your own branding will lend credibility to your agency. It will also serve as a constant reinforcement of your branding as clients go into the builder to manage their website.
3. Scalable website builder
Your website builder should be able to expand as your agency and client list does. Brizy Cloud’s Agency plan, for instance, comes with 100 workspaces — that means 100 dedicated spaces for 100 client projects, be they websites, landing pages, or special features like stories or pop-ups.
Your website builder should also empower your clients to grow their digital presences. If there are restrictions on how much traffic their site can receive, how much content they can store on the server, or what sorts of sites they can build, they’re inevitably going to run into issues with it.
If you want to make the website creation and maintenance process easier on everyone, scalability is a must. This is especially important if your agency designs ecommerce websites. Growth is an inherent part of the ecommerce business model and so you need a white label website builder that can support that process.
4. Intuitive website building experience
Many website builders today try to pack way too much into a small space. It might be nice to have all those bells and whistles if you ever need them, but most of the time, they just slow you down.
Feature-packed website builders can also be problematic for clients. If you want to empower clients to manage their website’s content, the builder has to be easy to use and require no technical knowledge to master it.
So finding a website builder that abides by the same principles of minimal web design that you use in building their websites is a must.
5. Editor customization
A drag-and-drop editor should come with all the building blocks you could ever want to quickly piece together your content.
A white label website builder, on the other hand, should give you the ability to choose which building blocks are visible. That way, you and your end users aren’t having to waste time sifting through dozens of block options.
Only the design elements you need are visible. By fine-tuning the builder at the elements level, you’ll make it more relevant and easier for everyone to use. That goes for your clients as well as the web designers on your team.
6. Diverse use cases
Different website builders do certain things better than others. Some are inherently great platforms for blogging. Others are good for constructing small business websites.
But if your agency builds websites for a wide range of clients, you need your white label website builder to be good at as many things as possible. For example:
Business sites
Blogs
Landing pages
Memberships
Popups
Stories
Each type of site requires very specific functionality. So having the ability to add that functionality without having to depend on 3rd party solutions is crucial.
You can even design a multilingual website with ease (without depending on 3rd party, expensive translation solutions).
7. Website templates
You can use white label website builders for a number of purposes. You can build and host your client’s site or online store with it. You can resell the website builder technology within a platform of your own. You can also create and sell websites through the platform with the integrated billing solution via Stripe.
Regardless of whether you’re the one building the websites or one of your customers, it would be beneficial to find a builder with an ample collection of pre-made designs.
Pre-made designs speed up the web design process and give you a beautiful and responsive framework to customize. But there’s another benefit of having all these assets at your disposal.
If you plan on using a white label builder to resell, you can offer the website builder for free. Then charge a premium to anyone who wants to unlock the hundreds of Pro designs available.
8. Top-of-the-line hosting
One of the reasons why people choose SaaS website builders over open source content management systems is the hosting component.
With SaaS website builders you don’t have to worry about hosting (limitations, uptime and more), security certificates (SSL), loading speed (Content Delivery Networks), updates and incompatibility issues that inevitably arrive when working with open source CMS systems and plugins.
That said, the best solution is a white label website builder without limitations that takes all the pain away and lets you focus on growing your business.
For example, Brizy Cloud white label site builder users can check on server status for outages.
Brizy can also back up its claims when it comes to matters like security and speed. All sites receive SSL certificate encryption. Plus, Brizy’s CDN offers faster-than-average page loading speeds.
9. Technical maintenance
In addition to offering unlimited storage and bandwidth as well as security and speed tune-ups, look for white label website builders that help with the technical upkeep of your sites. Specifically, see if you can find one that automates software updates and website backups.
You know that your clients aren’t going to want to deal with them nor will many even know how to manage them. And, let’s face it, you have better things to do with your time.
So if you want to ensure that the sites you build stay in good shape, find a website builder that includes technical maintenance as part of the deal.
10. Simplified project management
Agencies already have so many platforms they bounce between on a daily basis — email, marketing platforms, CRMs, accounting tools, etc. It’s a lot.
If you want to make things a bit easier to manage when it comes to the project side of things, look for a white label site builder with project and client management tools.
Within Brizy Cloud, for instance, agencies can create up to 100 workspaces.
These workspaces give you dedicated areas to store all the projects you’re working on for each client.
In addition to project management tools that help you stay better organized, the Brizy white label site builder also works as a client management solution. And if you plan on reselling the website builder, there are billing tools included to streamline that process as well.
All of this will be easy to manage from your accounts management dashboard.
Under the Clients tab, set up all your web design clients as free users. Then invite them as team members to give them access to the corresponding workspace you’ve set up for them.
You can also resell the website builder. You can do this using the included billing solution via Stripe. That will let you bill your clients monthly or yearly and create a stand alone revenue stream where your clients build the websites for themselves and you get paid for it. You’ll have your own Brizy Cloud.
You can offer free and premium plans as a reseller. For those who upgrade to your Pro plan, setting up a payment processor within Brizy Cloud is easy. You have the option to integrate with Stripe’s payment processor.
As a bonus, we’ll give you a series of white label videos that you can use to create website builder documentation for your users.
Being able to offer this type of DIY support — on top of any hands-on support you offer via your Support channel — is a great way to encourage users to choose your Pro plan. It’s also a good way to turn one-time website clients into loyal clients who look to you as a trusted partner.
Summary
Want to keep your web design clients from seeing which website builder you’re going to use to create their site? You should.
A high-quality white label website builder will do more than just enable you to replace the builder logo with your own branding. Robust white label functionality will empower you to improve your agency’s productivity and profitability.
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