Every day, we monitor thousands of WordPress websites for WordPress Development Agencies. This has given us a deep understanding of the WordPress agency market in Europe and overseas.
To write this article, I spoke with hundreds of digital agency owners to understand what really matters when it comes to choosing a WordPress Development Agency. In this article, I share with you the main takeaways of these conversations and analyses.
If you are reluctant to hire a WordPress Agency for your website or hesitate about which one, this article is for you! I’ll also get through the type of traits and skillsets an agency should always have.
The answer to these questions is simple: WordPress is the easiest, simplest, and most secure way to design a website. Almost 40% of the web runs on WordPress. WordPress is open-source and has a tremendous community of talented web developers keeping the service constantly up-to-date.
Originally made to create blogs, WordPress’s shares of the global content management market are 62% and about 15% of the most visited websites on the internet are actually WordPress websites. Yep, WordPress rocks.
Your business deserves the best, and an agency specialized in WordPress can give a competitive edge. People working with WordPress are passionated. Since they are mastering the CMS, they often troubleshoot issues faster and can provide you superior support.
You should always keep in mind that WordPress development agencies are working with the same framework: WordPress. So if you are not happy with your relationship it will be easier to move to another agency.
WordPress Development Agencies often work with managed WordPress hosting which is best for your website performance and uptime.
They are 6 key things you should consider before hiring a digital marketing agency.
The first thing you should always be doing is to define the purpose and goals of your website.
The answers to these questions are so important. They will help you to set up clear goals and define a fair quote with your digital agency.
Tips: a good agency should not try to sell you features, you are uncomfortable with. Don’t be afraid to say no!
This is one of the most crucial questions! How you tell your brand’s story is a critical element in delivering better marketing results. Websites are like flowers and you need to nourish them or they slowly die.
If you want to appear in search engines results you need to publish content on your website and probably on social media and this can represent a huge workload.
Will you have the time and SEO skills to send optimized content online? If you don’t, ask the agency to provide you with an example of the content they have made for other clients. This will also force you to think about your site architecture.
Writing an article like this one took me 2 full days and I’m used to it. A good SEO agency should help you to identify your key audiences and how to reach them online. This includes a list of topics and keywords you should be publishing about.
Tips: a good WordPress development agency should question your digital marketing strategy. Making a website is just not enough: if you want to go online, you need a global e-strategy.
Your internet website is way too important to be neglected. Beyond its cost, it will be your best showcase and you are going to commit (at least for a while) with the digital agency you pick up.
A good way to know if you are contracting with the right people is to ask for website realizations and references. If they are reluctant to share such data, just go away: there is plenty of fish in the ocean (cf the list below)!
Do not hesitate to browse websites such as truspilot to find out reviews.
On the one hand, you must install some plugins if you want your WordPress website to be successful. On the other hand, if you have installed too many of them, your website will be slow and unpleasant to navigate.
For example, you can ask your digital agency:
These are essential plugins for WordPress. By asking these questions, you will show your agency that you have a good level of understanding of WordPress.
Hosting performance is so important for UX and SEO. A good agency should deliver websites that load almost instantly.
You can use our latency checker to check out the performance of the agency website.
If the website needs more than 400ms to load, you should maybe look somewhere else.
Tips: always ask if they use a managed WordPress hosting and if no, why? Managed WordPress hosting provides better uptime and performance than shared WordPress hosting.
It’s pointless to have a beautiful website if it’s not accessible. Building a website is just the first step of a very long journey.
A serious agency should always include maintenance fees in its quotes. Why is that?
From security breaches to WordPress updates, there are a lot of reasons why your site may be offline. Downtime can ruin all your marketing efforts and jeopardize your company reputation, so it’s important to discover and fix them before your customers do.
A good WordPress development agency should thus monitor your website uptime and act within the hour if your website is down.
Let’s be clear: you get what you pay for. For a while, having a professional website was not a must-have: you could just pay off a student to do a vitrine website.
But this was before the covid-19 crisis. In 2021, a website is not an expense, it’s an investment. If you want to take your business online, you need the help of professionals.
Website development budgets can range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the first question you should ask yourself is: how much should I budget for my website? Here are some common figures about how much costs the creation of a WordPress website.
| Action | Price | More information |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | 10-40$ per month | Managed WordPress hosting is more expensive than shared hosting but they are more performant. |
| Plugins & services | 100-200$ per year | Some plugins and marketing tools essential to the success of a website. ie WP Rocket, SEOPress, Weglot, WP Umbrella, SEMRush, etc. |
| Web Development Phase | 85-200$ per hour | The most pages and features you need, the more expensive your website will be |
| Responsive Web Design | 60-120$ per hour | Responsive web design, logo, icons, infographics, banners, etc. |
| WordPress Maintenance | 30-150$ per month | Emergency support, ongoing security, backups, updates, etc. |
Both deliver benefits. WordPress Freelancers are more flexible and can help you to manage short term expenses.
The agency has a broader variety of skills and can help you to take your project to the next level, but they might be more expensive.
It’s a very personal decision: Do you prefer to have a direct relationship with a Freelance? Do you prefer to be secured by a whole team of WordPress and SEO experts?
There are amazing WordPress Freelancer, awful WordPress Development agency, and vice versa: trust your guts!
This list is not exhaustive and a lot of excellent WordPress Development Agencies aren’t listed. So how have we selected them?
This list of WordPress Development Agencies is made of the digital agencies we are working with. We vet for them, because:
In the beginning, Oh Hello was founded by a few misfits who were co-workers and confidants at a previous agency. It was their goal to create brands that grow businesses and touch hearts and minds. They decided one day to do the one thing every grown-up-of-the-machine dreams about: give up their day jobs and start their own company, putting an end to the old and welcoming the new.
That’s something we share with them!
Oh-Hello is a reliable agency based in Nebraska. They are customer centric and have a real-nice graphic touch!
The WordPress Whodunit agency reinvents your project with WordPress to bring you much more than a website: a new agile and collaborative experience. Custom WordPress site creation, audit and maintenance,The Whodunit Agency offers you a tailor-made alternative to match the ambitions of your WordPress projects.
This agency was created in 2009 by Emilie Lebrun et Nandor Wiener.
Akumaw is a Lyon-based Agency specialized in WordPress websites development. Thomas Deneulin, our CTO and Lead developer at SEOPress, is working for them from time to time.
The Fantassin agency creates custom WordPress sites, taking full advantage of the Gutenberg editor. I’ve been working with Fantassin on several projects over the last 3 years and what I really like about them is that they take the time to explain everything to their clients.
Axalys creates your graphic charter, your contents, and manages the online publishing and referencing of your website, your mobile applications and your business applications.
Since its creation, Agency Inside has continued to and continues to deepen its the deepening of its digital expertise
expertise – on all levels of web marketing by privileging the creation of sites well built for SEO that propels its clients in the first useful results of Google.
Ingenius Agency is a web agency specialized in WordPress website design. They have already helped hundreds of companies and solopreneurs to design effective and sustainable websites. The agency has its own base of modules that it has developed specifically for its clients in order to produce high quality sites while reducing costs. Thanks to an expert technical team and available interlocutors, Ingenius is dedicated to the satisfaction of its customers throughout the projects.
BSA Web is another specialized WordPress agency. Strategic advice, custom development, daily maintenance and professional hosting, BSA accompanies its clients from the reflection and development phase to production and maintenance. The agency’s little plus? Its willingness to respect WordPress standards (hello Gutenberg!) and web standard best practices (W3C, accessibility, Opquast quality assurance, etc).
Azuro Digital is an award-winning WordPress web design and development company based in Canada with offices in Toronto, Calgary, and Ottawa.
In addition to their design and development services, they also offer cutting-edge maintenance plans that go above and beyond the standard of care. Azuro is rated 4.99/5 overall with over 100 reviews online.
Our new system of templates for automated maintenance reports is now live and ready for you to use! With this new feature, you can easily generate maintenance reports with just a few clicks, saving you precious time to focus on other tasks and projects.
If you want to learn how to monitor your WordPress Serveur Uptime, Downtime & Performance, you are in the right place. Uptime monitoring plugins included.
Learn how to manage multiple WordPress sites effortlessly with the best WordPress management tools.
