White label web development: a guide for agencies

How a typical engagement flows

Your account manager sells the project and collects a brief. You or your designer produce page designs. The partner estimates the build, develops it in a staging environment, and you test it. After sign-off, the site goes live on hosting the client owns, and the partner is removed or kept for support.

The cleanest setup is a shared project board, a staging site and weekly demos. You see progress and give feedback in plain language. The client never needs to know the build partner exists.

Most disputes in white label work come from unclear handover, not poor code. Decide up front who writes the client-facing documentation, who gives training on the admin area and who answers the first support email after launch. Written answers on those three points save more time than any tool you can buy.

Start with one small project before you hand over a large one. A single landing page or a five-page site shows you the partner's speed, communication and attention to detail at a low cost.

White label, freelancers or in-house developers

A partner does not remove responsibility. Your name is on the site, so your review must be genuine.

What to put in the agreement

• Confidentiality, so the partner never contacts your client or mentions your arrangement.
• Non-solicitation, so neither side poaches the other's clients or staff for an agreed period.
• Intellectual property: the code and design assets transfer to you or the client on payment.
• Hosting and accounts: the domain, hosting and repositories sit in the client's or your accounts, never the partner's.
• Support period: how long the partner fixes defects at no charge after launch.
• Turnaround: response times for questions and bug reports.

Have a lawyer review the agreement. Data protection duties also apply when the partner can see client data, so check them in your own country.

Quality control you should not skip

1. Written specPages, features, platform, browsers, and an agreed definition of done.
2. Staging reviewTest on real phones and at least two browsers before the client sees anything.
3. Speed and accessibility checkRun Core Web Vitals and basic WCAG checks. Our Core Web Vitals checklist is a start.
4. Code reviewFor custom work, ask for a pull request and read the summary, or have someone technical check it.
5. Handover packCredentials, a short admin guide and a list of plugins and versions.

A partner who objects to these checks is telling you something.

Pricing and margin

Partners usually price at an hourly rate or a fixed amount per project. If you charge a client more than the partner charges you, the difference pays for sales, design direction, project management and profit. Be honest about your review time. Many agencies lose their margin on unplanned rework.

Our rate is $30 an hour and projects start at $1,500. Our fixed quote arrives within one working day of a short call. For general market ranges, the Clutch pricing guide is a useful reference.

Agree how change requests are priced before the first one arrives. Clients always add pages, so decide whether small changes fall inside the quote and what triggers a new estimate.

Working with Liftup

Liftup Technologies has been working since 2018, with 10 to 50 people. Our head office is in Pune, with offices in Coventry and New York. We build on Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce, Webflow and Next.js, and we build mobile apps in React Native and Flutter. You get one lead, weekly demos and code in accounts you control. See website development and the related WordPress development page, or read the broader outsourcing to India guide first.