Methods & checklists
White-label website audits for agencies: turning compliance checks into retainers
The question
You run an agency. Clients pay for builds, then disappear until something breaks. How do you turn a one-off client into a maintenance retainer — without inventing work that doesn't need doing?
What's actually true
Compliance is the rare category where the ongoing work is real, external, and documentable:
- The regulatory floor moved. The European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since June 28, 2025. In November 2025 — per contemporaneous press reporting — French organizations filed injunctions against Auchan, Carrefour, and E.Leclerc at the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris. In the US, UsableNet's year-end report counted 4,928 web accessibility suits across US federal and NY/CA state courts in 2025. None of this is agency marketing — it's court dockets and a public lawsuit count.
- Sites regress. Every content update, plugin change, or redesign can reintroduce accessibility failures, break links, or change what fires before consent. A site that passed once does not stay passed. That is the honest technical basis for a care plan — not fear, maintenance.
- The market prices this as a subscription, at subscription prices. At their published prices when we last checked: indie accessibility monitors run $19–159/mo per site, enterprise platforms like Siteimprove start above $12k/yr, and in France RGAA Checker runs 69–249€/mo (verify current pricing before quoting it). For an agency with dozens of client sites, per-site subscription pricing multiplies fast.
There's also a sales angle most agencies miss: an audit works on prospects, not just clients. Running a compliance audit on a prospect's site and walking in with cited findings is a foot-in-the-door built from evidence, not a pitch deck. We recommend using it that way explicitly.
How to do it yourself
A credible white-label audit practice needs four things:
- A repeatable checklist covering accessibility signals (automated WCAG checks on key templates), consent posture (what fires pre-consent), broken links, and SEO basics. Bundling them matters — the client experiences one report, not four vendors.
- Evidence capture. Every finding should link to the page state you observed at audit time. This is what makes the report defensible when a client (or their lawyer) asks "how do you know?"
- Your branding on the artifact. The report is your deliverable; it should look like yours.
- A re-scan cadence so regressions become the retainer's recurring deliverable — you're reporting real changes, not re-sending the same PDF.
You can assemble this from open tooling (axe-core for accessibility, a crawler for links) plus your own report template. The cost is your time, multiplied by the portfolio.
The shortcut, honestly priced
SiteComply is that four-in-one audit as a product: $29 per site, one pass, accessibility + consent + links + SEO basics, every finding linked to the exact page state we observed, white-label-ready for agency use. It's a one-shot report, not a subscription — the unoccupied entry point in a category where everyone else sells monitoring first. Same caveat we'd give any client: automated checks don't catch everything, and the report never claims more than it verified — that's precisely what makes it safe to hand to your client with your logo on it.