What Is Duda Website Platform And Is It A Good Fit For Agencies? via @sejournal, @martinibuster

There have never been more high quality choices for creating a web presence as there are today, which ultimately comes down to choosing a website platform that best serves your business needs. Duda focuses on the business needs of agencies that require the infrastructure to grow with more customers.

This article began with a WordPress versus Wix versus Duda angle.

But as I discussed each platform with the various stakeholders I came to realize that each platform did what they did really well serving, to a certain extent, a different user base.

Thus, this article became a three-part series exploring three different publishing platforms (Duda, WordPress and Wix) to understand what makes them the best in their chosen market.

Each platform is the best at what they do and today we look at why Duda is popular with web design and SEO agencies.

Choosing the Best Website Platform

Today there are two competing ways to create a web presence, proprietary (also known as closed source) and open source.

Proprietary content management systems take care of the technology underneath each website, freeing agencies and business owners to focus on growing their business.

Choosing a content management system (CMS) platform is not a matter of choosing the best CMS. It’s about choosing the platform that’s best for your business model.

The business case for closed source website building platforms like Duda or Wix is that they handle the technical aspects of building a website, allowing businesses to focus on their business without having to worry about updates, structured data, or optimizing for search engines.

Duda Professional Website Builder

Duda is a closed source platform designed to fulfill the needs of agencies and web professionals, regardless of size.

It offers collaboration and client management tools to help web professionals scale the process of launching and maintaining websites.

The focus on helping agencies scale is evident in the fact that Duda doesn’t charge customers extra for additional bandwidth or storage space.

What Duda excels at is making it easy and fast for agencies to prototype designs, collaborate with team members and clients and have all the features necessary for running a business on both the agency and the client side.

I asked Duda what makes Duda a good choice for agencies:

“The Duda platform is designed to help agencies build beautiful, modern websites for their clients faster than they ever thought possible at any scale.

No matter whether you have 10 or 10,000 clients, Duda provides agencies with an ultra-flexible platform that enables them to create conversion-driving websites with everything they need included–from hosting, templates, widgets, and SSL certificates all the way to our very knowledgeable support staff that is there to help agencies every step of the way.

Duda provides agencies with a user-friendly web design interface clients can access to update websites on their own.

And since the entire platform is white labeled, clients will only know you’re using Duda if you want them to.

Duda’s APIs and advanced development assistance are available for Duda partners with a high volume of websites.

Finally, Duda’s purpose is not only to be a leading website-building platform for agencies but also a valuable business partner for our agency customers, constantly seeking to support their business growth.

This vision guides us in everything we do as a company – from strategic business decisions to our product roadmap.”

Duda Scales Up for Growth

Wix’s model focuses on helping businesses easily build high performance websites and do business, with no technical knowledge necessary.

Duda’s approach is providing the white label technical infrastructure for agencies to build high performance websites for their clients, at scale.

Many SEO and web design agencies aspire to scale up to hundreds or even thousands of clients. Doing that demands a lot of technical infrastructure and human talent to take on the  prototyping, development and client collaboration at scale – all things that Duda provides.

I asked Duda how well they scale:

“Duda scales effectively.  In fact, Duda doesn’t charge its customers for storage or bandwidth, enabling them to scale without being concerned about incurring additional cost.

Duda’s platform is hosted on AWS. We guarantee 99.9% uptime and believe in transparency with regards to our uptime SLAs.

With Duda’s API, agencies can automate workflows to significantly increase efficiency and build client websites at scale.”

SEO is Baked into the Duda Platform

Performing well on search engines is critical.

As a closed source website building platform, Duda takes care of technical SEO factors as well as site speed performance, especially as measured by Google’s core web vitals metrics.

Core Web Vitals are performance metrics designed to measure how well a webpage performs for users.

A high core web vitals score will generally be matched with a better user experience, less visitor frustrations and higher conversion rates on sales.

Google’s support page about core web vitals shares why core web vitals track with higher sales and earnings:

“Studies show that better Core Web Vitals improves user engagement and business metrics. For example:

Clearly, a high core web vitals score is important for websites and in general those high scores are difficult to achieve, except for sites created on the Duda platform.

Duda has long been known as the Core Web Vitals champion, as reported by the independent HTTPArchive, a score derived from a sampling of website performance as experienced by real website visitors.

The current core web vitals scores on HTTPArchive shows Duda outperforming both WordPress and Wix by a wide margin.

Screenshot taken on May 24, 2023 of HTTPArchive Core Web Vitals Scores

Duda shared this about how SEO is native to the platform:

“Duda sites are born SEO-ready (Duda leads Google’s Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Results) and are built on a reliable AWS-hosted infrastructure that delivers 99.5% uptime.

This makes it possible for agencies to offer websites to their clients with low/no maintenance load.

In addition, Duda provides agencies with a user-friendly web design interface clients can access to update websites on their own.

And since the entire platform is white labeled, clients will only know you’re using Duda if you want them to.

Duda’s APIs and advanced development assistance are available for Duda partners with a high volume of websites.

Finally, Duda’s purpose is not only to be a leading website-building platform for agencies but also a valuable business partner for our agency customers, constantly seeking to support their business growth.

This vision guides us in everything we do as a company – from strategic business decisions to our product roadmap.”

Why Agencies Choose Duda

There are over 20,000 agencies who rely on Duda to help build and manage client websites, currently totalling over a million websites now hosted on the Duda platform.

I asked Duda why it was so popular with agencies.

They answered that there are five reasons why agencies choose Duda:

“1. Faster build times:
Agencies can build and maintain sites twice as fast compared to any other platform.

In addition, by integrating our platform directly into their service agencies can automate workflows, such as instant site creation, data collection, content management & more.

2. All-in-one solution:
Duda offers numerous built-in tools that help agencies drive success for their clients without relying on third-party plugins.

The platform includes hosting, templates, widgets, SSL certificate, client billing module, site comments for collecting client feedback, and much more.

3. Security:
Duda’s platform is regularly updated and maintained, ensuring a secure environment for websites.

Agencies don’t have to worry about keeping up with security patches or updates, as Duda handles this automatically.

4. White-label solution:
Duda’s white-label capabilities allow agencies to fully brand the platform as their own, offering a cohesive and professional experience for their clients.

5. Dedicated support:
Duda provides dedicated customer support, ensuring agencies have access to expert assistance whenever needed.”

In short, Duda makes it easier for agencies to grow their business by making it easy to service more customers.

Brian Lewis, CEO of WebAct Inc (LinkedIn profile), shared why he is enthusiastic about Duda:

“With Duda we have all of our clients under one dashboard where we can manage everything in a single location.

For the development side of things, we can create custom widgets and apps and do custom API integrations with ease.

The ability to customize the experience for our clients and agencies is very helpful for integrating a custom solution or vertical.

For example, an automotive company may need a custom filter that connects to their software to upload vehicle information as well as having the users of the website search the entire inventory.

We have been using Duda for 11 years now.

Overall the platform is great, it gives us a complete solution for serving our clients.”

Duda Professional Website Builder

Duda calls itself a professional website builder as a way to distinguish itself as a tool for professionals who service clients.

I don’t think it’s fair or accurate when people plant a flag on the ground and proclaim that one platform is better than another.

An apple is an apple and an orange is an orange.

Duda happens to be a fine choice that professionals should consider when planning how to best serve their clients and grow their business.