By Building a website from scratch — especially one that has a lot of features or content, such as an ecommerce site — takes a lot of time. Research and planning alone can take 80 or more hours (Onix Systems). One estimate on the total time to complete an average website development project is 10 to 14 weeks (Forbes).
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Agencies working with many clients can’t generally afford these types of timelines. If your team takes 14 weeks — between 3 and 4 months — to complete a website for each client, backlogs and unhappy clients stack quickly. The solution in many cases is offering ready-made websites for sale.
Table of Contents
- What is a premade website, really?
- Benefits of premade websites for agencies
- Overview of Vendasta’s Website Pro
- How Website Pro simplifies website creation for agencies
- Frequently asked questions about building websites
What is a premade website, really?
A ready-made or premade website can be part of your service model in providing clients with the tools they need for success with digital marketing while protecting the time and money resources of your agency. In this model, a ready-made website is a lot like a templated house.
Consider a townhouse community mid-construction. Each planned home is for sale. All homes follow the same footprint — three bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and similar kitchen and living space layouts. The construction company builds every unit to these specs, but it doesn’t complete the final touches until the unit is sold and the customer chooses fixtures, flooring, wall color, and other features to make the townhouse their own.
What a premade website isn’t
When you sell ready-made websites as part of your agency services, you typically aren’t creating pre-branded sites that people can buy. That is a business model, and it’s known as website flipping. With this model, you create websites based on domains, brands, or business concepts that you think someone might want in the future. Then you sell the website and domain name for a profit when that person or business comes along.
A premade website doesn’t have to be a 100 percent complete product. It may refer to a template or starting point based on web design services and work already completed by professionals.
From-scratch vs. ready-made websites
| From-scratch websites | Ready-made websites |
| Are coded from the ground up | Are based on templates and precoded elements |
| Require individuals or a full team of professional web developers and designers | Can support website creation without coding or design experience |
| 100 percent flexibility — whatever you need, developers can build, though this can come at a premium cost | Some flexibility, as you can usually customize templates and other elements |
| Take months or longer to develop | You can build the site in days or even hours, depending on a client’s needs |
| Requires extensive testing and debugging, which can delay implementation | Testing is streamlined and you likely have third-party support for any troubleshooting needs |
| You may be on your own with tech support if you’re developing the site in-house | You work with a website-building tool such as Vendasta’s Website Pro and have the support that comes with that |
Benefits of premade websites for agencies
From the table above, you probably already see some benefits of offering ready-made ecommerce websites for sale over creating sites for clients from scratch. Dig deeper into some of those benefits below to understand how ready-made websites can help you scale your agency whether you sell websites to local businesses or work with small and midsize businesses across the globe.
1. Faster website development time
If you’re learning how to sell websites to businesses, it’s important to understand how project timelines impact your success with clients. First, you obviously have to meet the project milestones you agree to. Second, if other agencies are delivering viable professional sites in much shorter timeframes than you can promise, you’ll miss out on sales.
Starting with prebuilt site components and templates cuts out weeks or even months of prep, coding, and development time, effectively shrinking your web delivery times by substantial amounts. This makes your agency much more competitive, especially with SMBs that can’t always afford to wait months or years for a new site.
Pro-tip: Add Gantt charts to your agency toolbox. Map out the timeline of each project visually for clients and wow them with your forethought and delivery times.
2. Reduced costs for agencies and their clients
In addition to increasing the website profit your agency can enjoy with each website job, ready-made sites decrease long-term costs for your business and help you pass on savings to clients.
Save on full-time employee salaries
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, web developers and digital designers in the United States make around $78,300 annually (BLS). In Canada, full-time professionals in similar jobs make an average of $107,313 (CAD) per year (Economic Research Insitute).
Agencies that keep numerous web development and design experts on staff can end up with salary-intense overhead — and they must pay those salaries even when there isn’t a web dev project in the mix. Starting with ready-made websites doesn’t mean you don’t need any dev or design resources. But depending on your business model and client needs, you can cut these types of labor costs significantly and may not need full-time in-house staff for these positions.
Reduce overall labor costs for each site build
Starting further down the development process with each client site lets you save labor costs associated with every area of the work, not just coding or design. Project leaders, customer service teams, and even content teams can get work done more efficiently when you begin with a familiar set of resources for every site.
Start with samples to cut down on miscommunications
Starting from scratch may mean beginning with rough sketches or vague concepts shared by a client. That can lead to misunderstandings and miscues that create hassle and unnecessary cost down the road if your team gets off on the wrong path. A ready-made site has enough existing infrastructure that the client can visualize their options clearly and everyone can remain on the same page about the project.
3. Access to professional web designs
A huge benefit of ready-made websites is that you don’t have to sacrifice quality outcomes for cost and time savings. When selling your website services, you know that clients want something they can’t produce on their own with minimal effort. Using the right website builder and reseller tools, you can ensure the products your agency provides are high-quality and based on design best practices.
The key is working with a tool that leverages professional work to create the foundations of what you’re building. The right prebuilt website tools ensure your agency has access to site designs and templates created by experienced designers. That means your end product is:
- More likely to follow current best design practices for the industry in question
- Is made of solid building blocks vetted by experienced developers
- Can compete with polished competitor sites in any niche
4. Customization options to support branding and audience needs
Obviously, you won’t get very far selling a website that looks exactly the same as all the other websites you previously sold — or sites being sold by the competition. That’s why it’s critical to ensure you have plenty of customization options to support client branding and the needs of each client’s target audience.
Templated predesigns let you create customizations including:
- Change colors and fonts. This lets you select elements that match the client’s brand and ensure a seamless visual experience for customers as they move from a client’s social media and other platforms to the client’s web pages.
- Add client branding elements. Import client logos and other pre-existing branding elements to ensure that the website is 100 percent ready for clients when it comes to messaging and aesthetics.
- Tweak certain template elements. Dynamic templates are incredibly customizable today. Your agency can swap up layouts and make other changes to templates to meet various client needs and preferences. In many cases, you could start with the same template for two websites and end up with two very different end products.
5. Increased agency efficiency
When you aren’t spending all of your resources on designing and developing websites for clients, your overall agency can function much more efficiently. Offering ready-made websites for sale allows you to provide a needed, credible product for clients while leaving your resources free to focus on strategy and marketing. In short, prebuilt sites free you to do the work that supports the ultimate success of the site for your client.
Overview of Vendasta’s Website Pro
If you want to know how to sell content online as an agency and you want to start with website services, Vendasta’s white-label website solutions are a great place to begin. The Website Pro tool is completely rebrandable, so you can use it to create ready-made sites for clients or resell it as a website-building solution.
Features and capabilities of Website Pro
Website Pro provides agencies with the tools they need to create and support successful websites for clients. A few of the main features of the tool include:
- Managed WordPress hosting. Work with a tool that your agency staff and many clients may already be familiar with when you build based on WordPress. Sites built with Website Pro are hosted on the Google Cloud Platform to support a wide range of scale needs for websites.
- Vertical-specific templates. Agencies have plenty of options for customization and can target clients in a variety of niches thanks to vertical-specific templates that drastically cut down on the time it takes to create a finished product.
- Top-notch security. Every site is backed by current security infrastructure that helps keep your clients’ data safe. Create value for clients by providing this level of peace of mind that they can pass on to their customers. This includes free SSL certificates and access to malware scanning.
- Dashboard management. You can use a single dashboard to manage multiple websites, reducing the time it takes to keep all your clients’ sites running smoothly.
- 24/7 support. You can connect with support anytime via email, live chat, or phone, so you and your clients never have to wait for answers to troubleshooting or functionality questions.
Customization options
WordPress has a huge share of the content management system (CMS) market. As of 2022, around 64 percent of sites that had a CMS used WordPress, and 43 percent of all sites on the web were based on WordPress (Search Engine Journal).
One reason WordPress is so popular is that it offers so much flexibility when it comes to customization. Website Pro starts with a WordPress foundation and creates professionally developed designs and templates on it. That way, agency partners retain the flexibility that comes with thousands of plugins and other WordPress features.
Integration with other third-party software
Powerful third-party integrations make Website Pro a strong website product for reselling. Agencies and their clients can benefit from thousands of WordPress plugins as well as many Vendasta solutions. Features and functions you can add to sites with plugins include, but definitely aren’t limited to:
- Subscription boxes and forms. Capture email addresses for future marketing efforts and build a community of customers.
- Contact forms. Build contact forms and other interactive elements that help drive leads and conversions.
- Search engine optimization tools. Easily optimize client sites and content with Vendasta, WordPress, or other third-party SEO tools.
- Metrics reporting and analytics. Get real-time metrics about site performance and use analytics tools to convert raw data into decision-driving information.
Plus, choose when you want to integrate client sites with important tools such as customer success management solutions.
How Website Pro simplifies website creation for agencies
The high-level overview of Website Pro above gives you some idea of the power of the tool and how you can use it to scale your agency and support your clients. Dig a bit deeper into a few of the features below to understand exactly how the tool creates a seamless, simple process.
Divi Builder features
Divi is a WordPress page builder plugin that lets you build and edit sites and pages via visual tools and drag-and-drop functionality. Designs are created in real-time, and you can see what’s going on with the page as you make changes, which means you don’t need coding or design experience to get the outcome you desire.
Unlike many drag-and-drop page builders, Divi has dozens of unique page elements to pick from and thousands of overall design options. You can also click directly into text elements to edit them within the same interface that you manage larger blocks and visual components in.
Access to a library of professional templates
Website Pro offers a wide range of professionally created templates in a myriad of verticles, making it possible for you to build industry-specific websites for clients quickly. That includes multiple ecommerce templates with built-in Woocommerce functions.
Some industries that are perfect fits for the Vendasta website builder templates include:
- Creative arts. Engage artistic clients with websites that support painting, photography, pottery, and other maker businesses.
- Retail. Quickly build ecommerce sites that also help clients, such as clothing boutiques, independent bookstores, pet stores, and comic shops, market locally and to wider online audiences.
- Health and wellness. Support clients in the wellness and fitness field with gorgeous and inspiring sites for yoga studios, fitness clubs, and dance academies.
- Services. Create customer-facing sites clients in service sectors such as home improvement, auto repair, cleaning, and hairdressing will love.
Seamless deployment of websites
From staging client sites to going live, Vendasta Website Pro creates a seamless process that wows clients and drives high customer satisfaction. Because all the functions, integrations, and design elements you work with are tried-and-tested solutions from professionals, you can trust that they’ll work in a live environment. You also have plenty of backup from Vendasta support as you implement websites for clients.
Ready-made site solutions let you seamlessly deploy in days or a few weeks instead of months if you need to meet aggressive client timelines.
Analytics and reporting tools
As an agency, your work is likely not done once you deliver a stunning new website to clients. You may be responsible for content marketing, SEO performance, or other efforts, which means you need real-time access to accurate metrics.
Work from a single dashboard to get an easy high-level view of all websites you manage, including understanding which websites need security or maintenance updates. You can also integrate Vendasta and third-party solutions to capture and analyze a variety of data points for marketing purposes, such as site and page traffic and conversion rates.
Frequently asked questions about building websites
How much does it cost to build an entire website?
Costs depend on the size and complexity of the website and what features you want it to have. An informational site with a few pages and a blog generally costs less to create than a full ecommerce site with product pages and shopping cart functions. Costs can range from $500 to $30,000 or more, and some large enterprises even invest millions. British retailer Marks & Spencer reportedly spent 150 million pounds — more than $180 million U.S. dollars — on a website build (This Is Money).
Where can I buy an already-built website?
Numerous agencies, web developers, and freelancers offer prebuilt websites. You can also find ready-made websites designed for specific purposes. such as prebuilt Shopify or ecommerce sites. When shopping for a prebuilt site, consider factors such as your budget, whether the site meets your needs, and what kind of future support you might get from the developer or seller of the site.
