We’re actively acquiring web design businesses, WordPress agencies, and recurring website client portfolios.
If you’ve spent years building a web design agency, you probably care quite a bit about what happens to your clients when you eventually step away.
So do we.
PageCrafter is a Minnesota-based WordPress design, hosting, development, and maintenance company, and acquisitions have become an important part of our growth.
We’re actively interested in acquiring small web design companies and WordPress agencies—especially businesses with stable recurring revenue from hosting, maintenance, care plans, support, security, website updates, or other ongoing website services.
You don’t necessarily have to be ready to sell everything, either.
We’re also happy to talk if you simply want to sell your recurring website clients, hosting accounts, maintenance plans, or another portion of your business while continuing to operate the rest of your agency.
Schedule a confidential call with Brian
What Kind of Web Design Agencies Are We Looking to Buy?
There isn’t one exact formula.
Generally, we’re most interested in established web design and WordPress businesses that have long-term relationships with legitimate small businesses and organizations.
Recurring revenue is particularly attractive to us.
That might include:
- WordPress hosting
- Website maintenance plans
- WordPress care plans
- Monthly website support
- Website updates and editing
- Security monitoring and malware protection
- Uptime monitoring
- Domain management
- Monthly or annual website subscriptions
- Website-as-a-Service arrangements
- Other ongoing website management services
We strongly prefer WordPress, simply because that’s where we have the most experience and infrastructure, but an agency does not need to be 100% WordPress to be worth discussing.
Project-based website design and development revenue is also perfectly fine. PageCrafter has been designing and developing websites since 2011, so we understand that side of the business too.
However, the more stable and repeatable your revenue is, the more likely we are to be interested.
You Don’t Have to Sell Your Entire Agency
This is important.
Sometimes an agency owner is ready to retire or move on completely. In that case, we’re happy to discuss acquiring the entire web design business.
But that isn’t the only possibility.
Maybe you love designing websites but hate dealing with hosting.
Maybe you’ve accumulated 75 maintenance clients over the years and no longer want to spend your time handling plugin updates and support requests.
Maybe you’re an SEO or marketing agency and website management has become a distraction.
Maybe you want to stop providing WordPress services entirely while keeping another part of your business.
Those situations can work very well for us.
We’ve structured acquisitions like this before. In one recent acquisition, the seller was an established agency offering SEO, website design, maintenance, hosting, domains, and other services. Rather than requiring one buyer to purchase everything, the business was divided up and we acquired the website hosting portfolio.
You can read the full breakdown here:
How We Acquired a WordPress Hosting Business: Real Acquisition Case Study
So if you’re thinking:
“I don’t want to sell my agency, but I would absolutely sell this part of it…”
Talk to me.
That may be exactly the part we’re interested in buying.
Recurring Revenue Is Especially Interesting to Us
A lot has changed in the web design industry.
Years ago, many agencies primarily made money by building a website, launching it, and moving on to the next project.
Today, many web design agencies have built substantial recurring revenue around those same clients.
That makes a lot of sense—and it also makes those businesses particularly interesting to us.
PageCrafter already provides managed WordPress hosting, maintenance, updates, website support, security, monitoring, development, and ongoing website management.
In other words, if you have 50, 100, or 200 clients paying you every month or every year to keep their websites working, we already have systems designed to provide those services.
You aren’t handing your clients to a buyer that needs to figure out WordPress after closing.
This is what we do every day.
You can see the type of ongoing WordPress services we currently provide through our Total WordPress Maintenance Package.
What If My Agency Also Provides SEO, PPC, Social Media, or Other Marketing Services?
That doesn’t necessarily matter.
PageCrafter is primarily a website company. We specialize in WordPress design and development, website hosting, maintenance, security, and related technical services.
We generally aren’t looking to build a large social-media-management or ongoing digital-marketing operation.
But that doesn’t mean an agency providing those services isn’t a potential fit.
It may simply mean we structure the acquisition differently.
For example, we might acquire:
- Your WordPress clients
- Hosting accounts
- Maintenance and care-plan clients
- Website support agreements
- Website design and development relationships
- A specific division or book of business
while another buyer—or you—continues providing other services.
I’d rather find a structure that makes sense than reject an otherwise excellent client portfolio simply because your company also happens to do things we don’t.
Why Sell Your Agency to PageCrafter?
There are plenty of business brokers, investment groups, and larger agencies interested in acquisitions.
We’re a little different.
My name is Brian, and I own PageCrafter.
I’m a website developer myself, and I’ve been running PageCrafter since 2011. We’re still a relatively small business, and our clients are generally other small businesses and organizations.
That means when I look at an agency acquisition, I understand what I’m actually looking at.
WordPress versions, hosting environments, DNS, premium plugins, maintenance agreements, strange legacy websites, forgotten domain registrations, clients who call once every three years, and billing records accumulated across multiple systems over a decade—none of this is foreign to us.
More importantly, we understand that these aren’t just rows on a spreadsheet.
You may have worked with some of your clients for 10 or 20 years.
I want those relationships to continue.
Our objective during an acquisition is to make the transition as uneventful as possible for your clients and to give them a good long-term home.
We’ve Done This Before
Acquisitions aren’t theoretical for us.
PageCrafter has now completed multiple website-hosting and client-portfolio acquisitions involving businesses throughout the United States.
We’ve transitioned dozens of websites at a time, taken over existing hosting infrastructure when appropriate, migrated websites when necessary, moved billing, coordinated domain and DNS access, and personally worked through the client communication required to make everything successful.
We’ve learned quite a bit along the way.
If you want an unusually detailed look at what one of our acquisitions actually looks like—including the good, the bad, the due diligence, valuation, client retention, billing issues, and transition process—you can read our real WordPress hosting acquisition case study.
You can also read our overview of the acquisition process.
And if what you really want to sell is strictly a website hosting business, we have a separate page specifically about selling your WordPress hosting company or hosting clients.
What Is My Web Design Agency Worth?
It depends.
A web design agency is usually more complicated to value than a simple hosting portfolio because there may be several very different types of revenue inside the same company.
For example, $100,000 of predictable recurring maintenance revenue is fundamentally different from $100,000 of one-time website projects that need to be sold and produced again next year.
When evaluating an agency, some of the things I’m interested in include:
- Recurring revenue
- Revenue history
- Client retention and churn
- Number and quality of clients
- How long clients have been with you
- Hosting and maintenance pricing
- Project revenue and profitability
- Client concentration
- Contracts and recurring commitments
- How dependent the business is on the current owner
- Employees and contractors
- Technology and hosting infrastructure
- Billing systems
- WordPress themes, plugins, and licenses required to service clients
- Opportunities to provide additional services to existing clients
You don’t need to have all of this perfectly organized before contacting me.
A high-level conversation is usually enough for us to determine whether it makes sense to keep talking.
If it does, we can sign an NDA and dig into the details from there.
How Our Agency Acquisition Process Works
1. Confidential Conversation
We start by talking about your agency, why you’re considering selling, what services you provide, and what you would ideally like a transaction to look like.
There is no commitment required.
2. Initial Review
If it sounds promising, we’ll look at some basic information about your clients, revenue, recurring services, expenses, technology, and business structure.
If confidential information is involved, we can put an NDA in place first.
3. Due Diligence and Valuation
We review the information in more detail, ask questions, and determine what we believe the business or client portfolio is worth.
4. Agreement
If we both want to move forward, we put the terms in writing.
We prefer straightforward agreements that clearly explain what happens, when payments occur, what each party is responsible for, and how unusual situations will be handled.
5. Client Transition
We work together on the initial announcement and transition.
From there, PageCrafter can handle the heavy lifting: client outreach, website migrations where necessary, billing setup, hosting, monitoring, maintenance, DNS, domains, and other operational work included in the agreement.
6. You Get Paid
The exact payment structure depends on the acquisition.
We’re open to different structures depending on the size of the deal, the reliability of the recurring revenue, what is being acquired, and how much transition work is involved.
Our goal is to find terms that are fair to both sides and then get the transition completed successfully.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you buy entire web design agencies?
Yes. If the business is a good fit, we are interested in acquiring an entire web design or WordPress agency.
Will you buy only my maintenance or hosting clients?
Absolutely.
In fact, those can be some of the best fits for PageCrafter. You can continue running the rest of your business while we take over recurring hosting, maintenance, care plans, or website support.
If you’re specifically looking to sell hosting clients, you can also visit our WordPress hosting acquisition page.
My agency is mostly project work. Are you still interested?
Potentially.
We build websites ourselves, so project revenue isn’t a problem. However, agencies with established recurring client relationships are generally more attractive to us than businesses that depend almost entirely on continually finding new projects.
It never hurts to reach out.
Do you only buy WordPress agencies?
No.
WordPress is definitely our preference and our strongest area of expertise, but we’re willing to consider businesses with other website platforms as well—particularly when a substantial portion of the client base uses WordPress.
What if I only have 10 or 20 recurring clients?
That’s still worth discussing.
We specialize in relatively small acquisitions, and we’ve always been willing to look at smaller portfolios if the clients and services are a strong fit.
What if I have hundreds of clients?
Definitely reach out.
We have the infrastructure and experience to evaluate considerably larger portfolios as well.
Do you buy agencies outside Minnesota?
Yes.
PageCrafter is based in the Minneapolis area, but our acquisitions and clients are not limited to Minnesota. Website businesses are particularly well suited to remote transitions.
Will my clients know I’m considering selling?
Not unless and until we agree that they should.
Initial discussions are confidential, and we can sign an NDA before sensitive information is exchanged.
If we ultimately reach an agreement, we’ll work together on the timing and wording of client communications.
Do I have to know exactly what my agency is worth before contacting you?
No.
That’s part of the conversation.
Send me some basic information about the business and I’ll tell you what additional information I would need in order to evaluate it.
Thinking About Selling Your Web Design Agency?
Let’s talk.
You don’t need a polished prospectus, a broker, or perfectly organized financial statements just to start a conversation.
Tell me a little about your company, approximately how many clients you have, what services they purchase, how much of your revenue is recurring, and what you’re hoping to accomplish.
I’ll take a look and let you know if I think PageCrafter could be a good fit.
Or contact me directly:
Brian Johnson
Owner, PageCrafter
brian@pagecrafter.com
952-457-4746