Traditional web agencies: why your site is holding you back, and what we do differently

The typical case we hear on a discovery call: a brand with a polished site, recently rebuilt, with real content. The trouble starts the moment you try to buy: the visitor leaves the site and lands on a shop hosted by another provider, with a different look, a different domain, and no way to touch it. Email runs on a third tool, unconnected to the first two. Nobody made a mistake: that is how a chain of traditional providers normally works.

We call a web agency traditional when its model dates from the era when everything was hand-coded: the back office, the front end, the hosting, sometimes the platform itself. The delivered site exists only at the agency. Every change goes through a ticket and a quote, every extra tool becomes a project, and the client ends up no longer touching their own site.

These agencies still have plenty of clients, often loyal ones, because most business owners don't know it has become simpler. We see the same pattern at law firms, fashion brands and service businesses. This guide describes what we find there, and what we do instead.

A law firm we rebuilt this year still showed, on its team page, three partners who had left three years earlier. Nobody at the firm could remove a photo: the site had been coded from scratch by the previous agency, with no editor. Every change was requested by email, quoted, then waited for. After a few months, they stopped asking.

That is the heart of the traditional model. The dependency is the agency's business model. Changing a button colour costs €800 because someone has to open the code, test, redeploy, and bill the time. The site was never designed to be handled by anyone other than its author.

We do the opposite. Every section we code can be edited from the admin without a developer: texts, photos, colours, block order. Before launch, we train the client's team and check that they can publish a page on their own. If they no longer need us after the project, the job was done well. What we put in the client's hands is detailed on /services/site-vitrine.

Many brands have two sites without realising it. The first presents the company. The second sells: a shop on a subdomain, a customer area at a provider, a quote form on a third-party tool. The visitor moves from one to the other at the exact moment they are about to pay, and that is where the gap shows: different look, different navigation, sometimes a different button label.

In the case above, payment takes you off the site, and the store locator comes from a third tool, supplied by a partner, with its own design. Three aesthetics for one brand, on one journey. The traditional agency accepts this stacking because each brick is a separate contract and none of them is its responsibility.

On Shopify, that separation no longer has a reason to exist. A single site presents the brand and sells, with the same typefaces, the same colours, the same menu. At Grillé, the shop tells the brand story and takes payment at the same address, with a store locator coded into the theme rather than supplied by a third party. Checkout is no longer a break.

Another frequent situation: a brand launches a newsletter. To send it, it picks an outside email tool, because the provider's own barely does the basics. Then it proves impossible to wire up the sign-up and confirmation properly: the platform exposes no connection interface at all. The result: one customer base on one side, one subscriber list on the other, and manual exports in between.

That is the second sign of a traditional chain: closed tools, chosen for the provider's convenience, that don't talk to each other. Every missing connection becomes a project, a quote, a delay. The brand can no longer try a new tool without going back through the agency.

We choose tools that expose their data. Shopify connects to Klaviyo, to accounting software or to a logistics tool in a few settings, and newsletter sign-up happens in the theme, with double opt-in handled on the email side. For brand sites, content lives in an open CMS (Sanity) that any tool can read. The brand can switch email tools without calling us.

An agency that built its trade by coding everything itself, back office included, has good reasons to distrust a platform it doesn't control. Ten years ago it was right: Shopify was rigid, every theme looked the same, and any feature outside the catalogue meant a paid app.

That is no longer the case. A Shopify theme is now coded section by section, with data stored in metafields, and a custom shop looks like no other. Grillé's cart with upsell, its store locator, its reseller packs: all of it is coded in the theme, with no monthly subscription. What we code instead of installing is detailed in this guide on Shopify without paid apps.

For the client, the difference is concrete. Shopify handles orders, stock, payments, invoices and logistics, and its admin is familiar to any employee who has already sold online. An agency's in-house platform is known to nobody outside the agency. When it shuts down or changes its pricing, the client starts from zero.

The table below sums up the differences we see most often between a site delivered by a traditional agency and what we deliver. Most of these agencies do serious work within their model. It's the model that has aged.

The price is fixed after a first call, and it doesn't move. We don't deliver a project where the client is 80% satisfied, or 95%: revisions are unlimited until launch, and whatever needs building gets built, with no feature cap hidden in the small print.

As a guide, a brand site starts at €3,000 excl. VAT, a Shopify redesign at €3,000 excl. VAT, and a full build at €4,000 excl. VAT. Those figures include the code for the features, not recurring subscriptions. The detail is in this guide on website pricing.

After launch, a bug gets a reply within 48 hours. Monthly support, between €800 and €2,500 depending on the volume of updates, exists for brands that publish a lot: Grillé, for instance, calls on us every month. The others carry on alone, and that is by design.

Five questions are enough, and the answers take ten minutes to find. If you answer no to three of them, your site belongs more to your agency than to you.

If you are launching a new brand or a new offer, the question barely arises any more: starting on a single site that is editable and connectable costs less up front and far less afterwards. That is what we did for Bobine, a magazine that already sold on Shopify and whose shop we rebuilt on the brand's identity, store locator included.

If you already have thousands of customers, logistics in place and contracts with specialised providers, the migration deserves an audit before any decision: what runs today, what transfers, what gets lost. When the change isn't worth the risk, we say so before signing. When it is, we also handle the technical side of the back office, data and order migration included, not just the design.

In both cases the first step is the same: a discovery call to look at your current site, your tools, and what is holding you back. Book a call.