White label web design: what an agency actually buys, and what the site has to pass

White label web design is sold as design. The partner’s page shows mockups, a style guide, maybe a Figma file with your agency’s logo on the cover. What your client receives is none of those things. Your client receives a website, and a website is what they will be judged on, audited against, and stuck with.

That gap is where most white label web design goes wrong, and it is not a design problem.

The short version

White label web design means a partner designs, builds, or designs and builds a website that you deliver to your client under your own brand. In 2026 the deliverable is a built site that can be tested: against WCAG 2.2 AA and the European Accessibility Act, which has applied since 28 June 2025; against Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds; and against a plain question of ownership, meaning every file and every account sits in your client’s name. A design file passes none of those tests on its own. The built page passes all of them or it does not.

Three shapes, and which agency buys which

The phrase covers three different purchases. Most confusion between agency and partner starts with not saying which one is on the table.

1. You design, the partner builds. Your team owns the brand and the Figma file; the partner turns it into a working site. This is what a design-led agency usually means by white label web design, and it is the shape where fidelity matters most: the thing you signed off has to be the thing that ships. We wrote up what a faithful Figma to WordPress conversion actually involves, and most of it applies whatever the platform.
2. The partner designs and builds, under your brand. You hold the client and the strategy; the partner supplies both halves of production. This is the common shape for PR, advertising and marketing agencies that sell websites alongside the work they are actually known for.
3. You hand over the brief and the partner runs it. Scope, design, build, launch, with you as the only point of contact on the client side. Closer to the reseller model than to a production handoff, and it suits agencies that want the revenue without the project management.

Whichever shape you buy, the finished article is the same: a live site with your name on it. So the tests below apply to all three.

What the delivered site has to pass, whoever’s name is on it

Four things. The first two can be checked against a published standard rather than an opinion; the other two against a contract and a content editor.

Accessibility, because the obligation is your client’s. The European Accessibility Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882, and Member States have applied its measures since 28 June 2025 to the products and services it lists, e-commerce services among them. The working standard underneath it is WCAG 2.2, a W3C Recommendation since 5 October 2023 and last updated 12 December 2024, at level AA. The useful measure of how rarely this is met is WebAIM’s annual survey of one million home pages: in February 2026, 95.9% had detectable WCAG failures, up from 94.8% the year before, and that counts only the failures a machine can find. A mockup cannot be run through that test. A built page can, and it is the built page your client is responsible for.

Performance, because Google publishes the thresholds. Core Web Vitals are Google’s three field metrics for a page, and two of the thresholds are worth memorising: a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds and an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds. INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on 12 March 2024, and it is where animation libraries and page builders tend to show up, because they run on the main thread that has to answer the tap. These numbers come from real visitors, not from a lab run on the partner’s laptop, so ask for them after launch as well as before.

Ownership, because it is the test nobody writes down. The code, the design files, the domain, the hosting account, the font licences and every third-party account the site depends on belong to your client from day one. Not to you, and certainly not to the partner. A site whose hosting sits in a partner’s account is a site your client is renting from a company they have never heard of. Who holds what at the end of a handoff is its own subject; the short form is that if you cannot name the owner of every account, you do not yet own the site.

Editability, because the site has to survive the launch. The client’s team will change the copy the week after go-live. A build where a heading can only be edited by a developer has turned a fixed-price project into an open-ended invoice, and the invoice comes to you.

Where white label web design actually goes wrong

Not in the design. Four places, all of them downstream of it.

• The design is approved as a file and the build drifts. Spacing, type scale and the breakpoints the file never specified get approximated, and the client sees the approximation. This is the most common complaint about the first shape and it is almost always a process failure rather than a skill one: nobody compared the built page to the file before it reached the client.
• “Web design” turns out to be a premium theme with the logo swapped. It ships fast and it demos well. It also carries every option the theme author wrote for every other buyer, which is where the performance and accessibility failures come from, and it means your client’s site shares its markup with thousands of others.
• Nobody tests the built page. The mockups were reviewed by three people and the live templates by nobody, so the first accessibility audit happens when a client’s customer complains.
• The accounts end up in the wrong name. Convenient on launch day, expensive the day your client wants to move.

None of these show up in a portfolio. All of them show up three months after launch.

What to ask before you resell anyone

Five questions. They take ten minutes and they separate a production partner from a mockup shop.

1. “Build to our file, or to your template?” Either can be right. A partner who cannot tell you which they are quoting is quoting the template.
2. “Show us a real accessibility and performance check on a page you shipped.” Not a badge on a homepage. The report, on a named template, with the fixes that followed it.
3. “Whose name goes on the hosting, the domain and the font licences?” The only acceptable answer is your client’s.
4. “Will you ever contact our client?” No, in writing, before credentials move.
5. “What happens the week after launch?” Who takes the first support ticket, and under whose name. The vetting checklist for white label partners runs the full version of this.

How it runs with us

The mechanics are the same as for any of our white label work, because the design half does not change them:

• Any of the three shapes. Build to your file, design and build under your brand, or take the brief and run it. Say which one you want and we quote that one.
• Built to pass the tests above, and checked against them before you see a staging link: WCAG 2.2 AA, the Core Web Vitals thresholds, and every account in your client’s name.
• NDA first, before we see a credential. No client contact, ever, in writing.
• Your brand on every surface, or no brand at all. Staging links, documents, support replies from an address on your own domain.
• You set the price. Our partner floors are on the For Agencies page, and what white label WordPress development actually costs walks through what moves a quote. The service page for the white label and outsourced production side has the rest.

Roughly 60% of what we do is production for other agencies, under their brand, and it has worked that way since 2008.

Where to start

Take one page of a site you recently delivered to a client, built by whoever built it, and run it through an accessibility checker and a Core Web Vitals test. Both take minutes and both are free. What comes back is what your client’s name is currently attached to.

If you would rather we did that on a page of yours and told you plainly what it would take to pass, send us the URL. That is the first conversation, and it costs nothing.