Axel Amer
Founder at BlueNest agency
Home / Case Studies / How we powered up a UK based marketing agency as remote tech department
NextGen Marketing is a digital agency based in London, UK. Their core services include SEO, email marketing, and website design. In addition to digital strategy and creative execution, they offer clients website development, maintenance, and hosting services — with WordPress as the primary CMS.
As their business grew, so did the demand for technical delivery — but scaling a development team internally proved inefficient, expensive, and unpredictable.
Over the course of 15 months, Codelibry became NextGen’s external WordPress department, taking care of 28+ websites, improve project delivery efficiency, and stabilize their profit margins.
Business Challenge: Choosing the Right Delivery Model
NextGen’s leadership team faced a common dilemma: how to deliver more websites reliably, without overcommitting to full-time developers or constantly managing freelancers.
NextGen needed a delivery model that could adapt to their real workload — without losing quality, speed, or profitability.
Technical Challenge: Inconsistent Tech Stacks Across Projects
These variations created onboarding friction for developers and made it harder to maintain consistent quality across projects.
Delivery Challenge: Matching Tech Capacity to Real Demand
This made internal team planning inefficient and hiring/firing costly. Freelancer-based solutions also proved unreliable — and agency leadership spent too much time managing production.
We started the partnership by aligning on the agency’s preferred development methodology: WordPress sites built using ACF Flexible Content templates.
By centralizing development with one partner, the agency regained control and saved dozens of hours previously spent managing multiple vendors.
We replaced the hourly billing model with a fixed-price model — backed by our internal estimation framework.
This allowed us to absorb minor changes during delivery (e.g., small visual feedback from clients) — without running over budget or time.
For larger changes, we provided timely updates and change requests, keeping the agency fully in control of their communication with end clients.
NextGen no longer had to worry about finding and onboarding a new developer every time a project came in.
They could now scale up and down with zero HR overhead, while maintaining the same code quality, standards, and communication flow.
This flexibility helped the agency say “yes” to more client opportunities — without overcommitting or adding internal pressure.
Even across projects with different foundations (e.g., Elementor, Blade, migrations), our team documented and shared best practices internally, ensuring we could move fast while keeping the quality bar high.
To ensure consistent, high-quality delivery across every website — whether it’s a full build, a maintenance update, or a critical hotfix — we follow a structured, multi-step QA process that combines technical checks, usability validation, and collaborative review.
The developer who implements the task begins with a thorough self-review to confirm functionality, responsiveness, code quality, and overall stability
The PM ensures that the output aligns with the task requirements, solves the business need, and is ready for client-side feedback. The PM also checks for content accuracy, layout alignment, and readiness for Q
A fresh set of eyes runs final checks — validating the task both technically and from a user perspective. This includes testing interactions, forms, responsiveness, layout, and user flow.
All tasks are tracked in Asana, where status updates are posted daily, so the agency always has a live view of what’s in progress, under review, or ready for approval.
Our quality assurance process is also powered by tools and pre-defined checklists that minimize human error and ensure reliable delivery.
We validate how websites behave across the most popular browsers and devices — including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge — using LambdaTest. This ensures pixel-perfect consistency and stable functionality for all users, regardless of device or environment.
For projects that require accessibility support or compliance, we run checks using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. This helps us catch issues with color contrast, ARIA labels, keyboard navigation, and other WCAG-related standards.
Before any project or major update goes live, our team runs through an internal go-live checklist covering technical, visual, and content-related areas. This includes:
These checks ensure the website not only works as expected but also feels polished and professional when it lands in front of the end client.
Once our internal QA is complete, the task or milestone is shared with the agency’s project or account manager. This creates a feedback loop that supports fast iteration and smooth collaboration.
When complex or ambiguous requests come in, we don’t guess — we initiate a conversation. Either the developer, PM, or tech lead will jump on a quick call with the agency team to:
This level of communication is what turns our relationship from “just outsourcing” into a real external tech department — one that’s deeply invested in your agency’s success.
Our development stack is tailored to meet both the needs of the marketing agency and their end clients. We focused on creating consistency across builds, ensuring fast handoffs, easy ongoing maintenance, and high performance for every project.
Every site we worked on was built on WordPress — a powerful, flexible CMS that remains the industry standard for digital agencies and their clients. Depending on the specific project, we extended core WordPress functionality using a set of proven tools and workflows:
ACF Pro was at the heart of our WordPress setup. It allowed us to build fully editable, modular websites without sacrificing design fidelity or stability.
The result: agencies and end clients were given full content control, while our code ensured pixel-perfect layout, responsive behavior, and high stability.
On the front-end, we followed scalable, component-based workflows that aligned with each website’s original architecture.
We made every effort to minimize dependencies, reduce page weight, and prioritize page speed — without sacrificing visual quality.
For projects where Blade templates where already implemented as part of the setup – we continue using them to keep HTML clean, manageable, and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself).
Using Blade also helped future-proof complex builds and made it easier to onboard new developers into ongoing projects.
We use Git on every project to manage versions, collaborate with other developers, and track changes over time.
Each site had a dedicated repo, and commits were clearly labeled for transparency. This allowed our agency partner to review progress asynchronously, reduce back-and-forth, and avoid last-minute surprises during deployments.
Our goal was always to retain what worked for the client while improving speed, reducing errors, and creating a maintainable system for long-term use.
One of the key reasons we were able to deliver 28 websites in 15 months – including maintenance, migrations, and new builds – is because we didn’t reinvent the wheel every time.
Instead, we worked within the existing structure of each site while improving stability, clarity, and maintainability. This reduced onboarding time, QA effort, and delivery cycles for every project.
Even in projects where multiple tech approaches existed (e.g., Elementor and ACF on different pages), we followed clear patterns and documentation, ensuring everything was aligned under one consistent workflow.
We have worked with Vitalli and his team for well over a year now and will continue to do so in the future. Having the confidence in an agency that allowed us to scale up and down development resources, as and when needed, has really made a positive difference to our agency.
This was a completely lucky find for us, but we can’t thank Vitalli and his team enough and look forward to working together for many years to come.
NextGen Marketing didn’t just outsource WordPress development — they upgraded how they deliver websites.
With a scalable team, reliable delivery systems, and predictable budgets, they unlocked faster growth while reducing stress on their internal team.
If you’re a marketing or creative agency struggling with the same challenges — too many delivery fires, unclear scopes, or unreliable freelancers — our white-label development partnership can help you scale with confidence.
