What Is White-Label WordPress Maintenance, and How Does It Work for Agencies?

The short version

"White-label" means one company does the work and another company sells it under its own name. For WordPress maintenance, your agency sells the ongoing care and a partner does it. Your client sees your name on the invoices, the reports and the support emails. They deal with you. The partner works behind the scenes as part of your team.

It lets an agency or freelancer offer ongoing WordPress care without hiring WordPress specialists, and without pulling designers and developers off paid project work.

How it works day to day

1. You keep the client. You sell the maintenance, set the price and send the invoice. The client relationship stays yours, and so does the margin.
2. The partner does the backend work. Hosting, plugin and theme updates, backups, security checks, and fixing things when they break.
3. Reports go out under your brand. Performance, uptime and security reports carry your name, so you can send them straight to your client.
4. Support stays under your name. Your client reports a problem the way they always have. The partner fixes it behind the scenes, and anything the client sees carries your brand.

White-label is not a referral

With a referral, you hand the client to another company and they become that company's customer. With white-label, the client stays yours. Your agency is the partner's customer, and your client never needs to know the partner exists unless you want them to.

Questions worth asking a partner

• Whose name goes on the reports, invoices and emails?
• Who does your client contact when something breaks? (It should be you.)
• How are emergencies on client sites handled?
• Can you set your own price to the client?

Here's how we answer them. Your company name goes on invoices, reports and support communications. Partner requests are prioritized by impact, and a client emergency jumps the queue. You set your own markup on our care plans, and we walk you through partner pricing when you apply.

Handing a finished site over to a client? Our agency client site handover checklist covers access, documentation and who looks after the site after launch.