Why Your Marketing Agency Might Not Be the Best Choice for Your Website: A frank discussion about website development and what businesses need to know before hiring
If you’re looking for a website for your business, you’ve probably considered hiring a marketing agency to handle everything in one place. It seems convenient, right? One company manages your advertising, branding, and your website. But here’s what many business owners don’t realize: convenience doesn’t always equal quality.
I’m going to be blunt in this post because this is an issue I see far too often, and it’s costing businesses money, performance, and growth opportunities.
The Problem with “Full-Service” Marketing Agencies
Not all marketing agencies are created equal when it comes to web development. In fact, in my experience, the majority of smaller marketing agencies that work with small and medium-sized businesses offer web services they’re not truly qualified to provide.
Here’s what typically happens: A marketing agency knows they can upsell web design to their clients, so they adopt platforms that make it “easy” for people without web development skills to build websites. Platforms like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, and others are specifically designed to let non-developers create websites quickly.
On the surface, this sounds fine. But here’s the catch: small businesses end up paying custom website prices for sites built on platforms that create bloated, poorly-coded websites that are difficult to maintain and don’t perform well.
Why This Matters: The House Analogy
Think of it this way: If you hired a contractor to build you a house, and they brought in a crew of inexperienced workers, you might end up with a home that looks beautiful on the surface. The drywall and paint job might be pristine. But underneath, you could have leaking pipes, faulty electrical wiring, and improperly placed studs that compromise the structure.
It doesn’t matter how good your house looks if the bones are rotten.
The same principle applies to websites. A site might look polished and professional, but if it’s built on a problematic foundation, you’ll run into issues when you need to:
- Add custom functionality
- Improve site speed and performance
- Scale as your business grows
- Integrate with other business tools
- Optimize for search engines and AI
What Wapiti Digital Does Differently
At Wapiti Digital, we primarily work with WordPress, and we’ve chosen this platform intentionally. WordPress allows clients to make their own edits easily, and it’s a universal platform—meaning you’re never locked in. If you decide to work with another agency down the road, your website can move with you.
We do use builders in our development process, but we use development-focused builders that output clean code, use proper development terminology, and create websites as if we’d hand-coded them. The difference is that these tools save us time without compromising quality.
The builders I’m warning against are designed to help non-developers look like they know what they’re doing. And that’s the fundamental problem.
Advice for Business Owners
Your website is as important as—if not more important than—your brick-and-mortar location. For many businesses, it’s the primary way customers interact with your brand. Yet I’ve seen business owners who pay thousands of dollars monthly for physical retail space balk at spending a few thousand on a quality website.
Before you hire an agency to build your website, ask these questions:
- Do you have in-house web developers? Not just designers, but actual developers.
- Do you use a builder for websites? If so, which one? Do some research on the answer you get.
- Can you develop custom functionality as our needs grow? This question reveals whether they’re truly capable or just using drag-and-drop tools.
Don’t be afraid to ask these questions even if you don’t fully understand the technical details. A good agency will be transparent with you.
Advice for Marketing Agencies
If you’re a marketing agency that doesn’t have web development expertise in-house, that’s completely fine. You should focus on what you do best: advertising, marketing strategy, branding, and client relationships.
But please don’t add a skill set you don’t have just because you found a tool that makes it easy. As with most things in life, the easier something is to acquire, the less valuable it typically is.
Instead, consider:
- Hiring experienced web developers to join your team, or
- White-labeling web services to an agency that specializes in web development
Some of the best agencies I work with are completely upfront with their clients: “We handle all your marketing, and we partner with Wapiti Digital to build your website because they specialize in conversion-focused, well-coded websites that perform.”
Clients appreciate this transparency, and it shows that you recognize where your expertise ends and where specialists should take over.
The Bottom Line
Just because an agency is excellent at advertising doesn’t mean they’re qualified to build your website—just like a skilled plumber isn’t necessarily a qualified electrician. Both skills are used in the same arena (your home or your digital presence), but they’re fundamentally different specialties.
Sometimes the best approach is to hire a web development agency and a marketing company separately. Or work with a marketing agency that’s honest about outsourcing web development to specialists.
Your website deserves the same level of expertise and investment as any other crucial part of your business infrastructure.
Ready to discuss your website project? At Wapiti Digital, we specialize in sales-focused website design and development. We work with e-commerce sites, membership systems, learning management platforms, and nonprofit organizations to create websites that not only look great but perform exceptionally well.
