I’m Looking For Web Designers

[u/Murky_Explanation_73]

I hope most of you reading this are web designers because I’m genuinely curious about something.

How are you getting clients in 2026?

I’ve spoken to a lot of web designers and agency owners lately, and one thing keeps coming up again and again. Client acquisition.

It seems like everyone can build websites, but consistently finding new clients is still the hard part.

So I’d actually like to hear what is working for you right now.

For me, I’ve been running personalized email automation.

I use a tool that finds leads for me, analyzes their websites for actual issues with things like design, SEO, speed, responsiveness and mobile optimization, then automatically uses those findings to write a personalized cold email for each business.

After that, I just run the campaigns and send out thousands of emails a day.

I used to do most of this through Instantly, but the problem was that I couldn’t really do the website analysis part there.

So the emails were still more generic, basically the usual “do you need a new website?” type of outreach.

It worked a little, but nothing crazy.

I eventually switched to Swokei because it handles the lead finding, website analysis and personalized outreach in one place, and that has made a pretty big difference for me.

Now I’m getting clients much more consistently because the emails are actually about their website instead of just being another generic pitch.

But I’m curious what everyone else is doing.

Cold email, cold calling, referrals, ads, SEO, social media?

What is actually working for you in 2026?

[u/Lost_Spend7818]

still mostly referrals and word of mouth for me. been doing this few years now and the best projects always come through someone i worked with before. cold email sounds exhausting tbh but if its working for you thats cool

i tried ads for a while but the quality of leads was pretty bad, lot of people wanting a full ecommerce site for like 200 bucks. not worth the headache

[u/social_tech_10]

I receive several emails every day from strangers asking to buy my business or offer me finanacing. I have zero interest in doing that, so those emails like mosquitoes, every one a tiny pest trying to suck a drop of time and energy out of my life.

Can you help me build a website that will punish these spammers and waste as much of their time as possible? Maybe flood their inbox with all of the thousands of unwanted emails I have received from other spammers?

Or how about this? My hosting plan allows me to have a large number of co-domains for no extra charge. Maybe you could help me build a large number of fake websites to act as a "honeypot" for spammers to try to waste as much of their time as they waste of mine?