There have never been such high-quality opportunities for creating a web presence as there are today. Ultimately, it all comes down to choosing a website platform that best suits your business needs. Duda focuses on the business needs of agencies that need infrastructure to grow with more clients.
This article started with an angle between WordPress, Wix and Duda.
But as I discussed each platform with the various stakeholders, I realized that each platform did what it could do really well and, to some extent, served a different user base.
As such, this article has grown into a three-part series examining three different publishing platforms (Duda, WordPress, and Wix) to understand what makes them the best in their chosen market.
Every platform is the best in its field and today we’re going to take a look at why Duda is popular with web design and SEO agencies.
Choosing the best website platform
Today there are two competing ways to build a web presence: proprietary (aka closed source) and open source.
Proprietary content management systems take care of the technology behind each website, freeing agencies and business owners to focus on growing their business.
Choosing a content management system (CMS) platform is not about choosing the best CMS. It’s all about choosing the platform that works best for your business model.
The business case for closed source website building platforms like Duda or Wix is that they take care of the technical aspects of website building and allow companies to focus on their business without worrying about updates, structured data or the Having to worry about optimization for search engines.
Duda Professional Website Builder
Duda is a closed source platform designed to meet the needs of agencies and web professionals regardless of their size.
It offers collaboration and client management tools to help web professionals scale the process of launching and managing websites.
The focus on helping agencies scale is evident in this Duda does not charge its customers for additional bandwidth or storage space.
Duda excels at allowing agencies to easily and quickly design prototypes, collaborate with team members and clients, and have all the functionality needed to run a business on both the agency and 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.
Whether you have 10 clients or 10,000, Duda offers agencies a highly flexible platform that allows them to build conversion-producing websites with everything they need – from hosting, templates, widgets and SSL certificates to our own Expert support staff to assist agencies every step of the way.
Duda provides agencies with an easy-to-use web design interface that clients can access to update websites themselves.
And since the entire platform is white-coded, customers only know you’re using Duda when they want to.
Duda APIs and extended development support are available for Duda partners with high volume of websites.
Finally, Duda’s goal is not only to be a leading website building platform for agencies, but also to be a valuable business partner for our agency clients, constantly striving to support their business growth.
This vision guides everything we do as a company, from strategic business decisions to our product roadmap.”
Duda strives for growth
Wix’s model focuses on helping businesses easily build powerful websites and transact business without the need for any technical knowledge.
Duda’s approach is to provide the white-label technical infrastructure for agencies to build powerful websites for their clients. on a scale.
Many SEO and web design agencies aim to expand to hundreds or even thousands of clients. This requires a lot of technical infrastructure and human talent to handle prototyping, development and customer collaboration at scale – all things Duda offers.
I asked Duda how well they scale:
“Duda scales effectively. In fact, Duda doesn’t charge its customers for storage or bandwidth, so they can scale without fear of incurring additional costs.
Duda’s platform is hosted on AWS. We guarantee 99.9% uptime and value transparency in relation to our uptime SLAs.
With Duda’s API, agencies can automate workflows to dramatically increase efficiency and build client websites at scale.”
SEO is built into the Duda platform
Performing well in search engines is vital.
As a closed-source website building platform, Duda takes care of technical SEO factors as well as website speed performance, particularly as measured against Google’s core Web Vitals metrics.
Core Web Vitals are performance metrics designed to measure how well a website is performing for users.
A high Core Web Vitals score is generally associated with a better user experience, less visitor frustration, and higher conversion rates on sales.
Visit Google’s Core Web Vitals support page to learn why Core Web Vitals leads to increased sales and returns:
“Studies show that better core web vitals improve user engagement and business metrics. For example:
- When a website meets the Core Web Vitals thresholds, research has shown that users are 24% less likely to abandon the page load.
- For every 100ms reduction in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Farfetch’s web conversion rate increased by 1.3%.
- Reducing cumulative layout shift (CLS) by 0.2 resulted in Yahoo! JAPAN resulted in a 15% increase in page views per session, 13% longer session duration, and a 1.72 percentage point decrease in bounce rate.
- Netzwelt improved core web vitals, seeing an 18% increase in ad revenue and a 27% increase in page views.
- By reducing the CLS from 1.65 to 0, redBus’ domain rankings have improved significantly worldwide.”
Obviously, a high Core Web Vitals score is important for websites and in general, these high scores are difficult to achieve except for websites built on the Duda platform.
Duda has long been known as a Core Web Vitals champion, as reported by the independent HTTPArchive, a rating derived from a sampling of website performance as experienced by real website visitors.
The latest Core Web Vitals scores on HTTPArchive show that Duda easily outperforms both WordPress and Wix.
May 24, 2023 screenshot of HTTPArchive Core Web Vitals ScoresDuda shared the following about how SEO is integrated into the platform:
“Duda websites are SEO ready (Duda tops Google’s Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Results) and are built on reliable AWS hosted infrastructure that offers 99.5% uptime.
This allows agencies to offer their clients websites with low/no maintenance.
In addition, Duda provides agencies with an easy-to-use web design interface that clients can access to update websites themselves.
And since the entire platform is white-coded, customers only know you’re using Duda when they want to.
Duda APIs and extended development support are available for Duda partners with high volume of websites.
Finally, Duda’s goal is not only to be a leading website building platform for agencies, but also to be a valuable business partner for our agency clients, constantly striving to support their business growth.
This vision guides everything we do as a company, from strategic business decisions to our product roadmap.”
Why agencies choose Duda
There are over 20,000 agencies that rely on Duda to build and manage client websites. Currently, over a million websites are hosted on the Duda platform in total.
I asked Duda why it was so popular with agencies.
They replied that there are five reasons why agencies choose Duda:
“1. Faster construction times:
Agencies can build and manage websites twice as fast as any other platform.Additionally, by integrating our platform directly into their service agencies, agencies can automate workflows such as instant website creation, data collection, content management and more.
2. Walkthrough:
Duda offers numerous built-in tools to help agencies increase their clients’ success without relying on third-party plugins.The platform includes hosting, templates, widgets, SSL certificate, customer billing module, site comments for collecting customer feedback and much more.
3. Security:
Duda’s platform is regularly updated and maintained to ensure a safe environment for websites.Agencies don’t have to worry about keeping up with security patches or updates as Duda does it automatically.
4. White Label Solution:
Duda’s white-label capabilities allow agencies to market the platform entirely as their own, offering a cohesive and professional experience to their clients.5. Dedicated Support:
Duda provides dedicated customer support, ensuring agencies have access to expert assistance when needed.”
In short, Duda makes it easier for agencies to grow their business by making it easier for them to serve more clients.
Brian Lewis, CEO of WebAct Inc (LinkedIn profile), shared why he’s excited about Duda:
“With Duda we have all our customers under one dashboard where we can manage everything in one place.
For the development side, we can easily create custom widgets and apps and do custom API integrations.
The ability to customize the experience for our clients and agencies is very helpful when integrating a custom solution or industry.
For example, an automotive company might need a custom filter that connects to their software to upload vehicle information and allow site users to search through 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 customers.”
Duda Professional Website Builder
Duda bills itself as a professional website builder to position itself as a tool for professionals serving clients.
I don’t think it’s fair or right for people to put 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 is a solid choice that professionals should consider when planning how best to serve their customers and grow their business.
