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For many agencies, platform choice shapes more than how sites are built. It decides what agencies can promise clients, how they price their work and how far they can scale. Clients feel it too in faster delivery, reduced complexity and fewer hidden overhead costs.
The second article of this series, “When Infrastructure Becomes Strategy,” shows what happened when Verndale took a closer look at their legacy platforms and the role they played in delivering value to clients.
Even the most successful agencies can’t escape the friction that happens behind the scenes. The technical constraints that stretch project timelines, the backend complexity that clients pay for but never see and the gap between what a team can design and what the tech stack actually allows them to build.
Verndale, a digital experience agency founded in 1998 with clients across manufacturing, hospitality and financial services, knew that challenge well. They’d spent decades working with enterprise-grade content management systems (CMS) and digital experience platforms (DXP) — robust tools purpose-built for complex, integrated environments that handle sophisticated requirements at scale. But that power comes with trade-offs: seemingly simple requests can turn into development tickets, making routine updates feel expensive and high-effort. As client expectations and budgets evolved, Verndale reevaluated how these platforms fit across different types of engagements, recognizing that the right tool depends on the complexity of the problem — not just the scale of the client.
Table of Contents
- A Deliberate Search for a Different Kind of Platform
- What the Infrastructure Shift Meant for Clients
- The Wins Behind the Shift
- The Strategic Argument
A Deliberate Search for a Different Kind of Platform
Verndale kept seeing a pattern among their clients: they were spending the majority of their web budgets on backend development and infrastructure. This left little room for the creative and strategic marketing work that actually moves the needle.
"We knew we had to find a CMS we could offer our clients that reduces the cost of standing up an experience while still achieving custom designs," said Jim King, Verndale's VP of Partners & Alliances. The goal was to redirect budget toward outcomes and work that clients could actually see.
Traditional headless CMS options were developer-dependent and expensive to maintain. Open-source platforms introduced security risks and accountability gaps. Verndale needed something that sat between a full DXP and a lightweight CMS — extensible enough to handle complex requirements, but visual enough that marketing and design teams could operate it autonomously.
For clients, this distinction is significant. When they can manage their own content and site updates, the agency relationship shifts from ongoing maintenance dependency to a strategic partnership that takes projects to the next level. The budget that used to go toward repetitive, low-level updates gets redirected to creative, strategy and optimization work.
Verndale’s search led them to Webflow, a visual web development platform that positions itself in that middle ground. The shift required some internal persuasion. "While no platform eliminates development entirely, I wasn't threatened by it — and I had to convince my developers not to be either," said Liz Spranzani, Verndale's Chief Technology Officer. "In the end, they love Webflow."
The turning point was realizing that the platform could handle genuine complexity — built-in testing, API integrations, dynamic data and custom designs. For Verndale, that means being able to build exactly what a client needs, and give them something they can maintain and evolve without coming back to the agency for every change.
The decision also came at the right moment. As AI began commoditizing basic development tasks, the value an agency delivers shifted away from code output to strategic counsel, design quality and speed to market. A platform that reduced development overhead wasn't a threat to the agency model; it was a way to get ahead of it.
What the Infrastructure Shift Meant for Clients
Verndale’s work with a job board connecting U.S. healthcare facilities with domestic and international nursing talent shows what’s possible for the agency and its clients. The client needed to serve both nurses seeking U.S. placements and those pursuing international opportunities — all while managing a constantly updating pool of job listings that had previously required significant manual effort to maintain.
Verndale used Webflow’s CMS collections and dynamic filtering capabilities to automate data integration and content publishing, pulling from multiple APIs including Google and external data sources to build location-specific pages. SEO-driven elements — tailored headers, metadata and structured job categories — were built into the architecture from the start, not retrofitted afterward. Collaboration features also accelerated the client approval process, a total shift from previously slow feedback cycles.
The result was a scalable and adaptable technical solution — one that the client’s team could actually operate on their own. This allowed the team to independently manage their content, efficiently handle job data and improve the user experience.
The Wins Behind the Shift
Verndale’s decision to migrate to a different platform showed early positive results. What used to take nine months on legacy CMS platforms now takes around five months — a 44% reduction in time previously spent on implementation and development. Implementation costs also dropped by at least 50%. Across comparable projects, the total cost is often three times lower than competing platforms.
These efficiency gains for Verndale meant more budget freed up for clients to spend on additional strategic work that impacts the bottom line. "We can help our customers focus their marketing dollars on the customer experience, rather than technology and development," said Spranzani. "We can bring new experiences to market much faster than we ever have before.” The improvement in Verndale’s infrastructure also shows up as faster timelines, more predictable costs and less post-launch complexity for the client side.
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Beyond implementation efficiency, Verndale plans to use Webflow Optimize to bring personalization, A/B testing and conversion rate optimization into their standard engagement model. For clients, this means one platform can power their site and ongoing testing and improvement, moving away from the overhead of separate optimization tools and project-based delivery to continuous performance management.
The Strategic Argument
Verndale built its practice over nearly 30 years by working across a wide range of technologies and client needs. The team has refined how it aligns platforms specific to business goals, priorities and constraints.
That experience gave Verndale a clear view into where traditional platforms excel — particularly in complex, deeply integrated enterprise environments — and where they can introduce unnecessary overhead for organizations that need speed, flexibility and autonomy.
"With rising interest rates and tighter budgets, marketing becomes more of a luxury, making efficiency crucial," said King. "By leveraging built-in capabilities instead of maintaining a team of backend developers, we can provide better value to our clients."
After expanding its platform strategy to include Webflow, Verndale created more flexibility in how it delivers value. For some clients, that means faster timelines and lower implementation costs; for others, it complements existing systems with more agile, marketing-friendly experiences.
The broader takeaway is that infrastructure is a strategic lever. When agencies align technology with business problems, they create space for the work clients increasingly prioritize — customer experience, conversion optimization and speed to market. In that model, value shifts away from maintenance and toward measurable outcomes.
The right platform changes what an agency can promise — and deliver. Learn how agencies using Webflow are building more profitable practices at webflow.com/for/agencies.