A lot of agencies will offer to “handle the website too”—usually as a convenient add-on to support their broader campaign or branding work. And if they specialize in your industry, it’s easy to assume they’re the best fit for the job. But that’s often the farthest thing from the truth. These aren’t website experts. They treat the site like a deliverable to check off—just something to get live so the real work (ads, content, social) can begin.
The result? A bloated, fragile site that underperforms, breaks easily, and quietly drains your ROI. We’ve seen contact forms that don’t send, broken links on high-traffic pages, tracking scripts that fail to fire, and landing pages that take five seconds to load. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars in ad spend are pointing traffic to these underbuilt pages—pages thrown together quickly with no technical oversight, no performance testing, and no long-term plan. Every one of those missed leads is money wasted.
If your website isn’t built to support and scale with your marketing efforts, then your entire strategy is sitting on a weak foundation. And sooner or later, that cracks.
“If your marketing strategy is built on a website that can’t convert, can’t scale, and can’t be trusted to work—then your ad spend isn’t an investment. It’s money lost on every click.”
At this point, you should pause and ask: what exactly is your marketing agency delivering?
About the Marketing Agencies That Don’t Understand the Complexity of Building and Managing a Website
Agencies that focus on ads, content, or branding often treat websites like static marketing assets. But websites aren’t brochures. They’re living platforms—built on layers of performance, accessibility, user experience, security, and technical infrastructure.
Without deep web development expertise, here’s what typically happens:
- They pile on tracking scripts with no performance consideration—Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Hotjar—all injected manually, no tag manager.
- They upload massive image files with no compression or optimization.
- They add whatever plugin "gets the job done"—no vetting, no oversight, just install and forget. Marketers aren’t trained to vet plugins, assess code quality, or diagnose security issues. They go with what looks good in the admin and assume that’s good enough. But under the hood, it’s chaos.
- Website Security? Forgotten entirely. No brute force protection, user enumeration open, XML-RPC enabled, admin accounts everywhere.
- They often grab an off-the-shelf theme from ThemeForest and run with whatever setup that theme author used. That’s how your site ends up with a hodgepodge of plugins, including outdated tools like Contact Form 7—just because it came pre-installed.
What you get isn’t a platform—it’s a patchwork of tools held together by a theme someone bought online.
They don’t know how to future-proof a site. They’re not thinking about how it will scale with your business. They're solving for "launch," not for "longevity."
Most Agencies Aren’t Equipped for WordPress Maintenance
Most of these agencies don’t offer real WordPress maintenance. If anything breaks, they call the freelancer who built it. That’s not a strategy.
Here’s the difference:
What Most Marketing Agencies Do:
- Install a backup plugin that backups up to the server, not a cloud hosted solution, leaving your backups vulnerable if the server data was lost or compromised.
- Allow vulnerable plugins to remain out-of-date
- Let plugin bloat accumulate month after month.
- Never look at performance, security, or uptime unless something breaks.
- Patch website performance with a plugin and call it a day. Clients often believe this is all you need to do, so the agency is fine with keeping it that way.
What WordPress Maintenance with Afteractive Looks Like:
- Run structured maintenance protocols weekly, not whenever there's a problem.
- Apply security updates within hours, not weeks.
- Perform audits for plugin usage, theme vulnerabilities, and performance drift.
- Disable common attack vectors (user enumeration, XML-RPC, open comments).
- Lock down admin access—most clients don’t even realize how many accounts have been added over time.
- Handle spam prevention for comments and contact forms (yes, that’s why you’re getting 20 junk leads a day).
- Vet plugins based on real-world experience—having tested hundreds over the years and knowing which ones create more problems than they solve.
- Remove the ability for clients to add unvetted plugins on their own
We don’t just keep things running—we proactively improve and protect them. That’s what WordPress maintenance should be. And it’s what most marketing agencies aren’t built to deliver. This is how you keep a WordPress site fast, safe, and healthy over time.
Our WordPress Sites Are Built Right—But Headless Is Built Better
We build high-quality WordPress sites. Fast, clean, accessible, and custom. But when the opportunity is right, we recommend going headless—with a CMS like Storyblok.
Headless CMS separates your content from your code, which means:
- Faster load times and better Lighthouse scores
- Scalable architecture
- Future-proof tech stack
- The ability to integrate with any tool or service
Marketing teams love Storyblok because they still get visual editing and easy content workflows—just without the bloat, fragility, and limitations of traditional CMS setups.
Why Composable Websites Make Sense—Even for Small Teams
You don’t need to be an enterprise to benefit from modern architecture. Smaller teams gain just as much (or more):
- Cleaner editorial workflows
- Easier localization and personalization
- Faster dev cycles
- Stronger performance and security by default
And while DIY becomes less feasible, that’s a good thing. We’ve all seen what happens when plugin after plugin gets slapped onto a WordPress install to solve problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Just add a plugin for the chatbot. Another one for a slider gallery. Another for SEO. Another plugin to fix performance. Another plugin to add tracking scripts, then another one to solve the security vulberability the last plugin opened.
Plugins exist because platforms want adoption, and people want shortcuts. But they introduce risk, complexity, and long-term maintenance costs.
With composable websites, we build what’s needed—nothing more, nothing less.
If your website feels like an add-on service to your main marketing campaign, It’s probably not built right
If your website is being handed to you as a freebie or a cheap add-on, it’s likely not being treated with the care and technical precision it needs.
Your website is your foundation. Don’t settle for something that was never built to last.
Work with a team that builds modern websites the right way—from solid WordPress foundations to fully composable, headless systems that scale with you.
