By the time you are choosing between proposals, you have seen three portfolios that all look competent. Portfolios are the easiest part of this business to make look good, and they tell you almost nothing about what it will be like to work with someone for four months.
These ten questions do. They are not gotchas — any agency that works the way it claims to will answer all of them quickly. The value is in how the answers are shaped, so each one below comes with what good and bad sound like.
Ownership
1. On day one, whose name is on the domain, hosting and analytics?
Yours, in your account, with the agency added as a user. There is no good reason for it to be otherwise and one bad reason it often is.
- Good: "Yours. We will send you a checklist of accounts to create and we will ask for access to them."
- Bad: "We handle all of that for you" with no further detail. Convenience and lock-in look identical from the outside until you try to leave.
2. If we part ways, what do we leave with?
Ask specifically: the repository, the database, the uncompressed design source, the content in a portable form. Then ask whether anything is licensed to the agency rather than to you — a theme, a plugin bundle, a component library, a font.
- Good: A direct list, plus a note about which third-party licences transfer and which you would need to buy.
- Bad: "You own the website." That sentence is compatible with you owning nothing useful.
Scope and change
3. How many unique templates are in this number?
Design and build cost scales with templates, not pages. An agency that prices in pages either has not thought about it or is leaving itself room. See what moves a website quote for why this one line moves so much.
4. What happens if we want a new template in week five?
Every project has a change like this. You are testing whether there is a process or an argument.
- Good: A named rate or a per-template price, a written change note, and a statement about what it does to the timeline.
- Bad: "We are flexible, we will look after you." Warm, and it means the conversation happens later, under deadline pressure, with the money already spent.
5. How many review rounds are included, and what counts as one?
"Two rounds" means nothing without a definition. One consolidated set of feedback per round, from one approver, is a workable rule. Feedback trickling in from five people over two weeks is three rounds wearing one hat, and whoever absorbs that cost is the real answer to this question.
Who actually does the work
6. Who will be writing the code, and will we meet them?
Not an accusation — subcontracting and distributed teams are normal and often good. Undisclosed subcontracting is the problem, because it means you cannot assess the people doing the work and nobody can answer a technical question without a relay.
- Good: Names or at least roles, where they are, and who you talk to when something is broken.
- Bad: "Our team." Ask again.
7. What standard is this built to, and how will you show us it was met?
Fast and accessible are either requirements with a number attached or they are hopes. A real answer names a Core Web Vitals target — Google's thresholds are 2.5 seconds for LCP, 200 milliseconds for INP and 0.1 for CLS, each at the 75th percentile of real visits — and a WCAG conformance level, and says how both get verified before handover.
- Good: Named targets, the method of verification, and a distinction between lab tools and real-user field data.
- Bad: A promised Lighthouse score and nothing else. Lighthouse is a lab simulation; it cannot measure INP at all, because there is no user interacting with the page.
8. Is the URL map and redirect plan in scope?
Only applies to a redesign, and it is the question with the most money behind it. Every indexed URL that changes needs a redirect to its closest equivalent, and the work is crawl, map, implement, verify in staging. An agency that has done migrations will have a strong opinion about this immediately.
After launch
9. What does month two cost, and what do we get for it?
Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and a named response time when something breaks. Some agencies include it, some sell it separately, some do not offer it — all three are fine, as long as you know which before you sign rather than the first time the contact form stops sending.
10. Tell me about a project that went badly, and what you changed afterwards.
The most informative question in the list. Everyone has had one. The answer tells you whether you are talking to people who examine their own work.
- Good: A specific story with a specific process change — a scope that was underestimated and the estimating change that followed, a launch that broke and the staging step that now exists.
- Bad: A story where the client was the problem. Sometimes the client is the problem. An agency that has learned nothing from it will not manage you any better.
Two things not to put weight on
- Awards and badges. Most are paid placements or directory listings. They are not evidence of anything except a marketing budget.
- The portfolio alone. A screenshot cannot tell you whether a site was delivered on time, whether it still performs, or whether the agency wrote the code. Open the live sites, test them on your phone, and check whether they are still standing.
Where we stand on all ten
Everything above is how we work, which is why we can publish the list: accounts in your name from day one, scope by template, a written change rate, named targets verified against field data, and a redirect map in every redesign. Our process page sets out the sequence and our pricing page sets out the ranges. If you are still deciding what kind of supplier you need, agency versus freelancer is the honest version of that comparison.