Why Most Marketing Agencies Shouldn't Be Building your Website

The Problem with Every Media Coampny Offering Websites

Every agency wants to be a “full-service” agency. That’s how we’ve ended up with social media firms, graphic designers, IT consultants, content marketers, and even video production studios all offering websites as part of their packages.

But here’s the problem: most of them shouldn’t. And we call into question—What kind of website is your marketing agency giving you?

They offer websites not because they’re good at them—but because clients ask or prefer to work with one agency of record. And on the surface, it feels efficient. You’re already hiring them for your ads or your branding, so why not just let them “handle the website too”?

Because most of the time, these agencies are shipping something that looks good at first glance but is deeply flawed under the hood—bloated, inflexible, insecure, unscalable. A short-term convenience turns into a long-term liability.

Who This Critique Doesn’t Apply To

There are exceptions. The top-tier digital agencies—think the 1–5%—have dedicated experts for every discipline:

• UX researchers
• Frontend and backend developers
• SEO strategists
• Accessibility specialists
• QA testers
• DevOps engineers

They have process, oversight, and technical excellence.

But that’s not who most small or mid-sized businesses are hiring. They’re hiring local marketing agencies, boutique branding firms, or content shops. And those teams often rely on one freelancer or one junior dev to cover everything. That’s the reality we’re talking about.

When your website looks polished, but is fundamentally broken

Here’s what usually happens:

• A site gets built quickly using a page builder.
• Plugins are slapped on to handle everything from SEO to contact forms to layout.
• It launches and looks fine.
• And then the problems begin.

Bloated plugins start to conflict. Pages load slowly. Google penalizes it for poor structure. Accessibility is ignored. Security holes appear. Updating it becomes risky. No one knows how to scale it when your business grows.

The agency might say, “Well, that’s just how WordPress works.” But it’s not WordPress—it’s the fact that they weren’t equipped to do more than just get it live.

So Who’s Actually Building the Site?

Here’s a question too few clients ask: if your agency doesn’t have an in-house developer, who’s writing your code?

Is it a random freelancer hired on Upwork? A white-labeled offshore team? A junior marketer poking around in a visual builder? Worse: is anyone actually managing quality, performance, or security?

Many agencies have zero technical oversight. They hand off the website build to someone you’ll never meet. There’s no version control. No performance testing. No review of the codebase. No plan for how this thing will evolve.

It’s a digital product with no product owner. And no accountability.

Why Websites Aren’t Brochures Anymore

The biggest mindset gap? Many marketing agencies still think of websites like they’re printed brochures: static, finished, unchanging.

But modern websites are platforms. They power digital growth. They drive conversions, connect tools, enable marketing automation, and serve as the digital home for your brand.

A real website is:

• Engineered for scale and speed
• Accessible to all users
• Easy for marketers to manage and optimize
• Flexible enough to evolve with your business
• Built with development best practices, not shortcuts

If your agency doesn’t understand that—or doesn’t have the team to execute on it—you’re not getting a site. You’re getting a liability.

What Happens When You Don’t Hire Specialists

When agencies without deep web expertise deliver websites, here’s what often goes wrong:

1. SEO Suffers

• Poor HTML structure, heading misuse
• Plugin-reliant SEO with no strategic setup
• No structured data, broken canonical tags, no sitemap strategy

2. Accessibility Is Ignored

• Missing alt text, no keyboard nav
• Color contrast issues
• No semantic HTML or ARIA roles
• Potential legal risk under WCAG/ADA standards

3. Security Is an Afterthought

• Outdated plugins or themes
• No firewall, no backups, no SSL enforcement
• Admin panels left exposed
• One-click install scripts with default settings

4. Performance Gets Overlooked

• Page builders + plugins = massive bloat
• No image optimization or lazy loading
• No code minification or critical CSS
• PageSpeed scores under 50, mobile UX disasters

5. Scalability Is Impossible

• Sites are brittle, fragile, and unextendable
• Changes require rebuilding or hacking
• Marketers can't create new content types or templates without dev help

6. No Development Workflow

• No staging environments
• No Git or deployment pipeline
• No way to test safely before going live

These aren’t minor issues. They affect your rankings, your brand experience, your conversion rates, and your cost of ownership.

Why marketing agencies still sell websites

So why do these agencies keep offering websites—even when they aren’t truly equipped to build them right?

Reason #1: Profit

Because it’s profitable. Because clients ask. Because most people won’t know better—until it’s too late.

Sometimes it’s done with good intent. The agency genuinely wants to help and believes they’re doing a decent job. But without a technical expert involved, they don’t even know what they don’t know.

In the worst cases, they know exactly what corners they’re cutting—and they do it anyway.

Reason #2: WordPress makes it easy

Because platforms like WordPress made it easy. With drag-and-drop builders, plugin marketplaces, and prebuilt themes, it’s never been simpler to spin up a decent-looking site without a developer. From the outside, it feels efficient. From the inside, it’s a shortcut.

But that convenience comes with a downside.

These tools lower the barrier to entry, not the standard of quality. Anyone can install a plugin. Anyone can launch a theme. But very few know how to optimize for performance, protect against security flaws, structure content for SEO, or build scalable, accessible systems.

So agencies lean on these tools to offer “website development” as a service—without the people or process to support what comes after launch. The result? A fragile site that works just well enough to pass approval, then quietly degrades in performance, security, and usability over time.

Clients assume everything is fine—until it’s not. And by then, they’ve lost time, budget, leads, and momentum.

How We’re Different

We don’t treat websites as an afterthought. They’re central to what we do.

Our team is built around the skills websites demand today:

• Strategic UX design
• Semantic, scalable development
• Custom Website Development using Headless CMS and custom WordPress builds
• SEO and accessibility baked into the foundation
• Modern, maintainable code

We’ve worked with marketers. We understand what they need. But we also bring what they’re missing—technical depth, future-proof thinking, and solutions built to last.

We collaborate. We integrate with your existing team. But we bring our own layer of quality control and innovation that most marketing agencies simply don’t have the resources or expertise to match.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Tech

This isn’t about gatekeeping. We’ve been in those rooms. We’ve worked alongside talented marketing teams. We know how valuable great strategy and content are.

But content and ads don’t reach their full potential without a strong foundation. When the site is slow, broken, inaccessible, or impossible to scale, your marketing is wasting money.

That’s the gap we close. We make sure the house you’re driving traffic to is worth visiting—and that it keeps delivering long after launch.

10 Questions to Ask Your Agency Before They Build Your Website

Before you hand over your website project, ask these questions. If they can’t answer confidently—or don’t even understand the question—you’ve got your answer.

1. Who will actually be building my site?
   Is it in-house, outsourced, or unknown?
2. What CMS or architecture do you recommend, and why?
   Generic answers like “we always use [insert builder]” are red flags.
3. How do you ensure site performance and speed?
   Look for mentions of page weight, Lighthouse scores, asset optimization, etc.
4. What steps do you take to ensure accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1)?
   If they say “we use alt text,” that’s not enough.
5. Will my site be easy for non-developers to update?
   Ask for examples of custom blocks or content structures they’ve built.
6. How do you approach SEO in the build process?
   Look for more than “we install Yoast.”
7. What is your process for version control, staging, and deployment?
   No Git = no real development process.
8. Do you offer support or maintenance post-launch? What does that include?
   Many disappear the moment the site goes live.
9. Can I scale this site over time without starting over?
   A good site grows with you.
10. What makes your web process different from a freelancer or generalist agency?
    Their answer should make it clear they specialize.

If You Care About Long-Term ROI, Hire Specialists

Your site is not just a deliverable. It’s a system.

If your agency doesn’t have dedicated developers, UX designers, accessibility experts, and performance engineers—stop right there. You’re not buying a website. You’re buying problems.

This is your brand’s foundation online. Don’t let a team that specializes in something else build it. Work with a team that lives and breathes this stuff. That’s how you get a site that performs, scales, and drives growth—not just one that launches.