One of the major challenges for digital agencies offering website management services is scaling effectively without negatively impacting performance. Handling website management for a short list of clients is a different ball game than staying on top of dozens, or even hundreds, of unique projects.
As your client list grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a system in place that ensures nothing falls through the cracks when it comes to maintaining website performance and security.
In this article, we’ll discuss why website management is particularly important for agencies with multiple clients, go over tips and best practices for how to effectively manage multiple websites, and provide a solution that you can start using today to streamline your website management so you can focus on what matters: growing your business.
Build, manage, and scale client websites without the technical hassle
Website management: why does it matter?
Your clients expect their websites to be up-to-date, functional, and optimized for search engines. Website management is the key to achieving these objectives and delivering high-quality managed website services to your clients.
Having an effective management system in place ensures that your agency can meet and exceed client expectations. Many providers of website services conclude their relationships with clients when they hand off a finished project. But client needs don’t end there. Websites require ongoing maintenance, and effectively offering management services can help your agency stand out by addressing this common pain point of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
Let’s take a look at some key reasons why website management deserves your attention if you sell website services:
Better client satisfaction and retention
Handing off a finished website build without offering management services means leaving money on the table. Websites require ongoing maintenance to remain updated, safe and secure, and well-optimized for SEO performance. Having a website management system in place enables you to meet this client need while generating a recurring, repeatable income stream for your agency.
Not only does this make for happy clients and better retention rates, it also means that when they’re ready for another website overhaul, your agency is far more likely to get that business.
Improved productivity and efficiency
Effective small business website management is all about having a streamlined workflow that enables your team to reduce repetitive manual tasks by automating routine activities. Trying to manage multiple websites without a dedicated solution in place can quickly become messy and overwhelming. Instead, website management solutions can save you time and resources and allow your agency to focus on high-value activities that drive revenue and growth.
Competitive advantage over other website services providers
There’s no shortage of options out there when it comes to creating a new website. Your prospects have the choice between different agencies, freelancers, and DIY solutions. Offering website management services can position your agency as a one-stop shop for all website needs and give you a competitive edge over others offering just web design and development.
Revenue growth
Web design is a one-time gig, while website management is an ongoing service. Being able to manage websites at scale can help your agency generate a reliable regular source of revenue, making it easier to plan for the future.
Scalability
Without a reliable site management system in place, your agency can quickly reach a ceiling when it comes to how many clients you can serve at a given time. With the right solution in place that enables you to effectively stay on top of a long list of websites, scaling your business to new heights is much more feasible.
Benefits of good website management
Alright, so we’ve covered why streamlining website management for multiple clients matters for agencies. But why should your clients care about it, and how can you position it as a valuable and worthwhile monthly expenditure?
The risks to SMBs of not managing their websites can be serious, with repercussions ranging from legal issues to hampered conversion rates.
Website security
Properly managed websites are more secure, which is important for protecting sensitive data such as client login credentials and credit card information. Security measures like SSL certificates, firewalls, and regular updates are powerful tools for preventing security breaches. Without these measures in place, clients are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks which can potentially result in expensive or reputation-compromising legal action.
For example, failing to regularly update plugins can lead to security vulnerabilities. By investing in website management, SMBs can ensure their plugins and other elements of their websites are always up-to-date.
Improved website performance
Websites that load quickly and work smoothly provide a far better experience to users, reducing bounce rates and boosting conversion rates. Regular web management tasks like keeping everything updated, optimizing images, minimizing code, and ensuring fast server response times are maintained can all impact website performance.
Optimized user experience
In addition to speedier loading times, users expect responsive interfaces, intuitive navigation, and regularly updated relevant content. Site management can ensure that all of these important components of a successful website are maintained and regularly improved upon, delivering the best user experience (UX) possible.
While these can be set up when a website is first built, they can deteriorate over time. For example, theme or plugin updates might break parts of the front end of a website, and failing to catch these changes can result in non-responsive sites or otherwise poor user experiences.
Better SEO
Performing well in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is about more than just using the right keywords in website copy. Ranking factors include page speed, responsiveness, a clear and organized structure, and more. Website management ensures these important ranking factors are maintained and continually optimized, supporting SMBs SEO efforts.
Reduced downtime
Downtime can be costly for your SMBs both in terms of lost revenue and damage to their brand reputation. Good website management includes regular monitoring and maintenance to detect and fix issues before they cause downtime. Aspects of website management like monitoring server performance, uptime, and response times all play a role in reducing downtime.
Similarly, in the unlikely event that something does go wrong with a website, performing regular backups—a key component of web management—makes it easy to get things back up and running as swiftly and easily as possible.
If an SMB has bothered to invest in a new website, it’s well worth the ongoing investment in website management to ensure their site continues to perform and be reliably accessible to their clients.
Challenges of managing multiple client websites
Time constraints
If your agency has many clients to serve simultaneously, the amount of time that can be devoted to each website will be limited. This can lead to rushed work, missed deadlines, and an increase in errors, ultimately impacting client satisfaction and your agency’s hard-earned reputation. Without a system in place to balance your workload and competing demands effectively, each website project won’t get the attention and resources it requires.
Resource allocation
Resources like staff time, software tools, and hosting capacity play a role in managing client websites. As your list of websites grows, ensuring these resources are properly used to ensure every site is well-managed can become a challenge. Over allocation of resources can also be a problem, leading to overspending on web management when the same work could have been done with a more efficient use of resources.
Managing costs
The tools and resources required to host, maintain, and manage multiple websites can add up, eating into agency profits. Growing digital agencies must carefully balance these costs against the revenue generated by each client. This includes making strategic decisions about resource allocation, prioritizing projects based on their revenue potential, and finding solutions to streamline processes to reduce costs.
Identifying priorities
With a long list of client websites requiring regular attention, it can be easy to get bogged down in low-priority work at the expense of more important tasks. Your team can also waste valuable time simply trying to identify which websites require the most pressing attention. Ideally, you’ll have a system in place that helps you identify high-priority projects effortlessly. Without this, managing priorities can become a significant challenge for agencies with multiple website management clients.
Scaling
Growth is great, and usually a significant goal for digital agencies. But it can also come with growing pains. A system that works for managing 10 or 20 client websites won’t necessarily scale to be effective for the management of 100 websites. Just as agencies get in the groove of managing their current workload, an increase in opportunities can represent a serious challenge.
Communicating with colleagues
If multiple team members are responsible for site management at your agency, effective communication to ensure work doesn’t get duplicated can be a challenge. As your list of projects grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a system of communication that automatically captures what work has already been done and what remains to be done.
Tips and best practices for website management
The challenges outlined above can be addressed by knowing which website management tasks need to be completed regularly and having a solution or system in place to ensure they all get completed.
First, let’s take a look at some tips and best practices that cover the kinds of activities that should be included in website management services. Then, we’ll discuss a solution you can use to put it all together.
Maintaining website security
Maintaining website security is one of the most important components of website management because the stakes are high: a security breach can compromise private company or user data, opening SMBs up to negative press and even potential lawsuits.
Digital agencies must ensure that client data is protected and secure, and that their websites are not vulnerable to all-too-common cyberattacks. To achieve this, there are several key activities that digital agencies should practice for web management clients.
- Regular backups: Regular backups ensure that website data is recoverable in the event of an attack or other data loss incident. Digital agencies should schedule regular backups of website data and store backups securely. The best hosting solutions will include daily backups.
- Strong passwords: When onboarding new clients, digital agencies should instruct their clients to use complex passwords and two-factor authentication to access the back end of their websites. Staff should also be trained in password hygiene to avoid weak passwords or password reuse, which can expose businesses to cybersecurity risks.
- SSL certificates: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are used to encrypt data that is transmitted between a website and the browsers that access it, making it more difficult for attackers to intercept sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers. Digital agencies offering website management services should ensure all client websites have valid SSL certificates and that they’re always renewed before expiration.
- Firewalls: Firewalls can be used to block unauthorized access to client websites. Consider installing and configuring firewalls on your client websites to help prevent cyberattacks.
- Security monitoring: Having tools in place to monitor client websites for signs of suspicious activity or security breaches can help you catch problems early. This can include monitoring website logs, setting up alerts for unusual activity, and regularly scanning websites for potential vulnerabilities like out-of-date plugins.
Maintaining website performance
Website performance and SEO performance are closely linked since many aspects of web performance are direct Google ranking factors. If an SMB client has invested in a beautiful new site, they’re likely investing in SEO as well to drive traffic to their new home on the web. Website management is an essential component of any effective SEO strategy.
Let’s take a look at some tips and best practices for ensuring every website your agency manages performs well.
- Optimizing images: Large image files can dramatically slow down page loading times. For all managed websites, ensure that images are optimized for web use. This can include compressing images, reducing file sizes, and using appropriate, web-friendly file types.
- Responsive design: With an ever-growing share of website traffic coming from mobile devices, websites need to look great and remain usable regardless of which device they’re being accessed from. This means all parts of a website should adjust to different screen sizes and resolutions. This can be accomplished using flexible layouts, scalable images, adjustable font sizes, and mobile navigation menus.
- Minimizing plugins: Plugins can add a lot of great features to a website, but they shouldn’t be used in excess. When it comes to WordPress website management, you should audit all of your client websites to make sure installed plugins are actually being used and adding value. You should also regularly update active plugins.
- Using a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can significantly improve website performance by distributing website content across multiple servers. Implementing the use of a CDN to deliver website content to users will make a site faster, regardless of where it’s being accessed from.
- Caching: Caching temporarily stores website data on a user’s device, reducing the need for frequent (and slow) data requests. Enabling caching for client websites improves website performance and speed for regular visitors.
- General website optimization: Regularly reviewing client websites for general performance issues, like slow-loading pages, broken links, and other issues that can help identify problems that impact website performance.
Testing for user experience
User experience (UX) matters when it comes to reducing bounce rates, boosting conversions, and improving retention rates. Plus, much like website performance, it’s linked to SEO. Regularly schedule these tasks to test your client’s WordPress site and check on the UX.
- Testing website functionality: Since parts of a website can stop working or break after updates to WordPress, the website builder, theme, or plugin, functionality should be tested after any changes. This can be done in a cloned website/staging environment and includes testing forms, shopping carts, and any other interactive elements of the site.
- Ensuring website accessibility: To make client websites accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, website management should include testing and implementing features like alt text for images, video closed captioning, and keyboard navigation options. This can also help you avoid any costly web accessibility lawsuits down the road.
- Browser and device testing: Testing client websites across different browsers and devices can ensure they’re fully responsive and provide an optimal user experience regardless of device. Testing tools are available to simulate this without the need to physically access a range of different devices.
How to streamline your website management tasks
This may sound like a lot of work, especially when applied to a large list of client websites. However, by streamlining how you deliver website management services, you can improve your efficiency, reduce costs, and provide optimal services to all clients at scale.
Here are some ways agencies can streamline website management tasks:
- Use a website builder to create fast, responsive websites more efficiently. A great website builder will also speed up the time it takes to make changes and updates to a site.
- Consider using project management software to organize tasks, deadlines, and communication with clients and team members.
- Develop a standardized in-house process for website development, from design to launch, to ensure consistency and reduce errors.
- Use automation tools to perform repetitive tasks such as backups, updates, and security checks.
- Consider outsourcing website management tasks to white-label teams to free up internal resources without sacrificing your reputation.
- Make use of analytics tools to monitor website performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Use cloud-based services for website hosting, maintenance, and storage to reduce infrastructure costs and improve scalability.
Why WordPress Hosting has the best solutions for managing multiple SMB websites
The best way to deliver website management services at scale is with a dedicated tool that combines hosting, automation, and scalability. Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting is designed specifically for agencies that manage multiple client websites and need to deliver consistent performance, security, and results.
What Is WordPress Hosting?
Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting is a fully managed, white-labeled hosting solution built on Google Cloud Platform. It gives agencies the tools to build, manage, and scale client websites efficiently while maintaining top-tier performance and security.
Unlike traditional hosting providers, WordPress Hosting includes built-in automation, staging environments, analytics, and CRM integration. It allows agencies to scale without the technical hassle, ensuring every client website stays fast, secure, and optimized for success.
Developer tools are easily accessible through the Admin Dashboard, where agencies can manage all client websites from one place. With just a few clicks, users can update, monitor performance, and access staging environments, eliminating manual maintenance and improving productivity.
Advantages of WordPress Hosting
Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting stands out because it is purpose-built for digital agencies and multi-location brands. It simplifies website management, enhances scalability, and supports recurring revenue growth.
Multi-site management
Managing dozens of client websites individually is time-consuming and error-prone. With centralized multisite management, agencies can oversee up to five subsites from a single dashboard. Perform one-click updates to plugins, themes, and WordPress versions, track uptime, and monitor analytics without logging into each site separately. This streamlined workflow saves hours of manual work and ensures consistent performance across every project.
White-label platform
Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting is a fully white-labeled solution that lets you brand the platform as your own. Resell it to clients as a proprietary service that includes managed hosting, maintenance, and AI-powered engagement tools.
Through Vendasta’s ecosystem, you can also access white-label fulfillment services to handle website builds, updates, and maintenance under your agency’s brand. This flexible model enables you to scale your business efficiently while only paying for services as you use them. Your clients receive expert service, and your agency maintains full ownership of the relationship and brand experience.
Integration with sales and marketing tools
Vendasta’s platform integration gives agencies access to advanced tools for sales, project management, and client retention. Use the Snapshot Report to uncover client needs through automated assessments, then convert insights into projects managed directly within the same environment.
With Task Manager and CRM integration, your agency can streamline project workflows, automate communication, and provide clients with a seamless, data-driven experience—all connected to their hosted websites.
WordPress Hosting vs. other website management solutions
While there are many website builders and hosting providers on the market, Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting delivers unmatched value for agencies managing multiple clients.
WordPress Hosting vs. Duda
Duda provides a drag-and-drop builder and basic hosting, but it lacks advanced management features such as a centralized multisite dashboard or staging environments. With WordPress Hosting, you can perform updates, monitor performance, and manage backups across multiple client websites from one place, saving time and reducing maintenance complexity.
WordPress Hosting vs. Webflow
Webflow offers an intuitive no-code builder, but is limited when it comes to post-launch website management. Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting extends beyond design and build stages by offering continuous optimization, uptime monitoring, automated backups, and Google Cloud performance for every site.
WordPress Hosting vs. Wix
Wix is ideal for entrepreneurs managing their own websites, but lacks the scalability and professional tools needed for agencies. Managing multiple Wix sites requires manual logins and fragmented workflows. Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting eliminates this issue with centralized oversight, staging tools, and performance analytics in one unified dashboard.
Using WordPress Hosting to save time and boost revenue
Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting empowers agencies to scale operations, generate recurring revenue, and deliver exceptional service without additional overhead.
- Low-maintenance management of multiple WordPress sites: Automate updates, backups, and SSL certificates while managing everything through a single dashboard.
- Streamlined website development: Build sites faster with pre-configured staging areas, one-click installs, and vertical-specific templates that reduce setup time and costs.
- Robust website analytics: Track site performance and user behavior to identify upsell opportunities and provide measurable value to clients.
- Seamless ecosystem integration: Combine WordPress Hosting with Vendasta’s CRM, AI Workforce, and Marketplace tools to deliver complete digital solutions under one roof.
Website management FAQs
1. What is website management?
Website management involves maintaining and optimizing a website after it’s launched. It includes updates, backups, security monitoring, and performance improvements to ensure the site runs smoothly and supports your clients’ business goals over time.
2. Why is website management important for agencies?
For agencies, website management ensures client sites remain secure, fast, and SEO-friendly. Ongoing maintenance strengthens relationships, prevents downtime, and provides recurring revenue opportunities. This turns one-time design projects into long-term partnerships.
3. How does website management differ from web development?
Web development focuses on building a site from scratch, while website management covers what happens afterward. Managing a site includes regular updates, performance monitoring, and optimization to keep it secure and running efficiently post-launch.
4. What tasks are included in professional website management services?
Comprehensive website management covers updates to plugins and software, security scans, backups, performance checks, SEO audits, and uptime monitoring. Many agencies also include analytics tracking and ongoing content updates as part of their management plans.
5. How can agencies manage multiple client websites efficiently?
Agencies need centralized control to avoid juggling dozens of logins and manual updates. Vendasta’s WordPress Hosting simplifies this by letting agencies oversee backups, staging, analytics, and plugin updates for multiple sites in one dashboard, saving time and reducing errors.
6. How does AI support modern website management?
AI streamlines management by automating repetitive tasks, identifying security risks, and optimizing performance in real time. With Vendasta’s AI Workforce, agencies can also integrate chat and lead engagement tools directly into hosted sites, turning visitors into qualified leads automatically.
7. What are the benefits of using a managed WordPress hosting solution?
Managed hosting eliminates the technical burden of manual updates and maintenance. Vendasta’s managed WordPress Hosting, built on Google Cloud, delivers exceptional speed, daily backups, and built-in analytics so agencies can focus on strategy and client growth instead of troubleshooting.
8. How does website management improve SEO performance?
Consistent management keeps websites technically sound and optimized. Tasks like speeding up load times, fixing broken links, and updating content help search engines crawl sites efficiently, leading to stronger visibility and better ranking stability over time.
9. Do small businesses need ongoing website management?
Yes. Even small business websites require regular care to stay secure and effective. Without management, outdated plugins, broken forms, or slow performance can hurt credibility and conversions. Proactive management helps SMBs protect their investment and maintain consistent online results.
10. How does Vendasta help agencies scale website management services?
Vendasta’s all-in-one platform brings together hosting, CRM, automation, and reporting so agencies can manage every client website from one place. White-label fulfillment and AI-driven tools make it easy to scale operations, expand services, and deliver measurable results with less overhead.
