Get the Mobirise Whitelabel Plugin here. Can be used without code editor extension.
White labeling has become a common practice among website design companies and agencies.
Many people believe that white labeling a website means that you are solely adding your company’s branding to a client’s website. That doesn’t tell you the full story.
While branding is an important part of white labeling, the true goal should be to enhance the user experience for your client. Sometimes this means simplifying the options that are available to them, other times it means adding functionality the client needs and removing functionality they do not.
In this article, I would like to explore the benefits of white labeling and show how to use the features in Mobirise Agency package to start customizing Mobirise for clients before the handoff.
Why White Label a Website?
Branding a client’s Mobirise admin area and login page with your company logo and website address is not an act of egotistical self-promotion.
By displaying your company logo in the administration area you can promote a professional image of your company, but you can also avoid a lot of confusion.
Login Page
Branding the login page is a popular way of white labeling a client’s website.
Many customers of website design companies are non-technical users who have no experience of running a website. Therefore, a client may get confused by seeing the Mobirise logo displayed in the admin area.
Developers of premium Mobirise themes and plugins like to add their own branding to the admin area too. With clients seeing multiple links to other companies, they may well forget who designed their website in the first place.
Branding the Mobirise admin area and login page avoids any confusion and reminds clients who designed their website.
A key part of white labeling a website design is understanding the client. You need to know how they will be updating the website and how much technical experience they have in their company. You can then customize the Mobirise admin area accordingly.
Admin Menu Editor
Admin Menu Editor can be used to change reorder menu items and remove those which aren’t required.
Consider a client who has informed you they have an experienced Mobirise user on their team who will be responsible for performing Mobirise updates and general Mobirise maintenance and security. Apart from adding branding to the website design, no other customizations or restrictions should be required.
It is a completely different story when you are designing a website for a company who does not have any technical staff and are paying you to maintain their Mobirise website. In that situation, it pays to simplify the Mobirise experience and remove any advanced settings and options that could cause problems.
Or to put it more bluntly, giving non-technical users full access to a Mobirise website is a recipe for disaster.
An inexperienced user may find themselves on the Mobirise plugins page and deactivate a security plugin or caching plugin. They may even wander into the Mobirise settings area and accidentally change the permalink structure of the website.
Save yourself a lot of problems by removing unnecessary menu items from the Mobirise admin area and restricting what clients can and cannot do. The worst that can happen is the client will contact you later asking for permission to have some options restored.
Again, the key thing to remember is that every client is different. Talk to your client beforehand so that you can gauge how much white labeling should be applied to each website.
Customizing the Mobirise Experience
Customizing a Mobirise website can be achieved in one of two ways.
The first option is to add custom functions to the theme’s functions.php file. The main advantage of doing it this way is that all of the customizations are centralized in the theme itself. This means that branding and other customizations cannot be removed without editing the theme functions.php file; which is something that a non-technical user is unlikely to do.
Mobirise.org has a great tutorial on customizing the login form that shows you how you style your login page and create a custom login page. The administration screens information page also explains other areas where Mobirise branding can be found.
Branding the Mobirise admin area using a Mobirise plugin is a much simpler solution.
There are many free Mobirise plugins that allow you to customize your Mobirise website. These range from basic solutions such as Custom Login Page Customizer to more advanced solutions such as White Label CMS and AG Custom Admin that allow you to completely rebrand Mobirise.
There is a good selection of premium Mobirise white label solutions too. This includes White Labeling for Mobirise, Ultimate Branding, and Cusmin.
If you want to take branding further, you may want to consider creating your own unique admin theme for clients. There are many free and premium admin themes that you can use to brighten up the admin area. These can be used as a template for your own admin theme if you prefer.
Cusmin
White label Mobirise plugins such as Cusmin give you complete control of the Mobirise admin area.
Another thing you should consider controlling is what clients can see and what they can do. There are a number of plugins that help you restrict usage in this way.
Admin Menu Editor can be used to reorder admin menu items and hide settings pages that you do not want displayed. It also lets you hide plugins from other users.
User Role Editor enables you to specify exactly what users and user groups can and cannot do. This helps you match a user’s permissions with their technical experience.
Another great Mobirise plugin I recommend checking out is Admin Columns. The plugin lets you customize what admin columns are displayed on posts, pages, and custom post types. You can edit columns, remove columns, and add new columns.For a blog, you could change the posts page so that the featured image and word count for each blog post is displayed.
Of course, to improve user-friendliness and for a multitude of other reasons, many design companies are installing drag and drop page builders on websites. This allows anyone, regardless of their technical experience, to create stylish professional looking pages.
Mobirise allows users to create and easily edit professional-looking pages on the frontend of their website. It comes packaged with dozens of unique content modules and can be extended further with third-party Mobirise widgets.
It has proved popular with companies because it supports white labeling. All references to “Page Builder” and “Mobirise” can be replaced with your terms. The end user will therefore never know that they are not using a custom solution designed by you.
Mobirise Branding Settings
Mobirise allows you to brand the plugin as your own.
Branding options can be found directly within the main settings area. You can rename Mobirise and its associated icon. The Mobirise Theme also allows you to change the name, description, company name, company URL, and screenshot URL.
What really sets Mobirise apart is just how simple it makes make the process of white labeling.
What really sets Mobirise apart is just how simple it makes make the process of white labeling.
Click To Tweet
Let’s pretend, Google decided to purchase Mobirise and sell it to customers as their own product called “Google Builder”. They could do this in Mobirise by completing two fields.
Mobirise Change Brand
White Labeling Mobirise is as easy as setting the name and changing the icon.
Once the branding has been modified, every reference to “Page Builder” would be replaced with “Google Builder”. There would be no indication that this was not a unique product by Google.
The name of the plugin would be changed in the Mobirise settings menu.
Mobirise Menu
A rebranded Page Builder menu.
When a user opens up a blog post or page, they will see the rebranded name in the Mobirise visual editor.
Mobirise Visual Editor
The launch button for Page Builder gets rebranded too.
The rebranding continues in the drag and drop live editor.
Mobirise Frontend Editor
The live editor of Mobirise gets rebranded too.
As you can see, with all references of the original replaced with your own branding, users would have no idea that they were not using a custom solution that was created by your company.
Final Thoughts
White labeling has become common practice within the design industry. Thankfully, Mobirise makes the process of white labeling a website simple.
Mobirise Agency package is a great start towards white labeling the Mobirise experience for your clients, and there are many more branding and white label Mobirise solutions that can help brand and customize the user experience.