You have three quotes on the table, and they look nothing alike. One fits on a single page, another runs to twelve. The prices vary by a factor of three. Every provider shows nice examples, good ratings and sometimes an award or a badge in the footer. To choose the right web design agency, look elsewhere: what you can verify matters more than what is on display, and a quote is read line by line, not by its total.
Past work comparable to your project
A portfolio shows what a provider does best. It doesn’t tell you whether they can do your project. Look for work that resembles yours: the same size, the same type of site, the same constraints. A studio that builds beautiful online stores isn’t necessarily at ease with a bilingual institutional site, and the reverse is true too.
Visit those sites yourself, on your phone, not just the screenshots in the portfolio. Are they still online? Is the content up to date, a sign that the client manages to edit it? That is the test we invite you to run on our work.
Then ask what exactly the provider did. Design, development, copywriting, or only the upkeep of a site built by someone else? Agencies often work with partners, and subcontracting is nothing unusual. What matters is knowing who will build your site, and who will answer when something stops working.
Google reviews, with some distance
Google reviews are useful, as long as you read them instead of looking at the rating. A review that describes the project, the timeline or how a problem was solved is worth more than ten “Excellent service” with no detail. Read the owner’s replies too, especially to negative reviews. The tone of a reply to criticism tells you about the relationship ahead.
Read the number of reviews with caution. A studio that delivers few projects, but large ones, will always have fewer than an agency that delivers many. Be wary instead of perfect ratings that arrive in a burst. Google prohibits paid reviews, incentives offered in exchange for a review and selectively asking for positive reviews, but not all of them get caught.
The most useful complement to reviews is simple: ask for the contact details of two clients, ideally for projects similar to yours, and call them.
Awards, badges and certifications: what they really prove
An award logo or a partner badge is reassuring. Before giving it weight, ask what it evaluated.
Commercial awards first. The Consumer Choice Award, for example, names one business per category and per region. According to its website, it combines consumer evaluations, online research and artificial intelligence results, after ruling out businesses with a legal or ethical problem. The site doesn’t say how many consumers are consulted, how much weight each source carries, or what the award costs the winner. That isn’t a bad sign in itself. But if a provider puts this award forward, ask how they got it and what using the logo costs them.
Partner badges say something else. The Google Partner badge rewards the management of Google Ads campaigns: it requires managed ad spend, a minimum optimization score and employees certified in Google Ads. It says nothing about the quality of a website. Shopify’s partner program is free, and everyone joins at the first tier; only the higher tiers, granted based on performance, set a provider apart.
Technical certifications are worth what they measure. A passed exam on accessibility, cloud hosting or a platform proves knowledge, not the quality of a delivered site. Design awards, for their part, reward appearance, rarely speed or how easy the site is to edit.
An award can be a positive sign. It doesn’t replace a concrete evaluation of the work delivered, and that is exactly what you can do yourself.
Technical quality can be checked before you sign
You don’t need to be a developer to judge a provider’s technical quality. A few free tests, on their own site and on two or three sites they delivered, are enough.
Speed first. Run the addresses through Google’s PageSpeed Insights or our speed test, in mobile mode. Google recommends that the main content of a page appears within 2.5 seconds. It is one of the three Core Web Vitals, which measure the speed and stability of pages. A perfect score isn’t required. Pages that struggle to load on a phone, on the provider’s own site, are a bad sign.
Then go through the site with the keyboard, no mouse, using the Tab key. Can you always see where you are? Can you open the menu and send the form? A provider who takes accessibility seriously shows it first on their own site, often with an accessibility statement, like ours.
Finally, look at how the site appears in Google: does each page have its own title and description? And for security, one question is often enough: who updates the site, and how often? A WordPress site delivered and then left without updates quickly becomes a target.
Transparency and ownership: your website must be yours
This is the point people forget most, and the one that costs the most later. The day you change providers, everything in their name becomes a problem.
The domain name must be registered in your company’s name, with an email address that won’t leave with an employee. Same for the hosting, the Google accounts (Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager) and the Cloudflare account if there is one. Your provider accesses them as a guest, with their own credentials.
Licences for paid plugins raise the same question. If they are in the provider’s name, ask what happens at the end of the contract. The site keeps its plugins, but often without updates or support once the licence expires.
Also ask whether another developer could take over the site. A theme developed for you, with a minimum of documentation, can be taken over. A site built on an in-house tool that only its author knows how to evolve ties you to them for a long time.
Finally, insist on full administrator access, not a limited editor account. You may never use it, but no one will be able to hold you hostage. On the sites we deliver, the domain name, the hosting and the administrator access are in your name: we would rather keep our clients through the quality of our work than through constraint.
After launch
A website isn’t finished on launch day. It needs updates, backups, monitoring, and someone who reacts when a form stops sending its emails.
Ask the question before you sign: what happens the day after launch? Some providers offer a maintenance plan, others hand over the site and the responsibility that comes with it. Both are defensible, as long as it is in writing. What isn’t defensible is vagueness: a site everyone believes is maintained, and that nobody updates.
Have them specify who checks the site after updates, where the backups are and whether anyone has tried restoring them, who renews the licences, and who steps in if the site is hacked. You can very well manage all of that yourself. If you would rather hand it off, our maintenance plans list line by line what is included, and what isn’t.
Compare quotes on more than price
Let’s go back to the three quotes from the start. If one fits on a page and another runs to twelve, it isn’t a matter of style: they probably don’t describe the same site. A price gap of three to one is almost always explained by what is included, or left out. To compare, you need to know exactly what each one covers. Check these points in every quote, and ask when one is missing:
- Design: are mockups planned, for which pages, with how many rounds of revisions?
- The number of pages, and above all the number of different sections to design. Ten pages built from the same sections take less work than six pages that are all different.
- Features: forms, booking, online store, member area, connections with your tools.
- Languages, and who handles the translation.
- Content: who writes the copy, who supplies the images, who builds the pages.
- What is included by default: measured speed, accessibility with a target level, a structure that is easy for Google to read (headings, markup, sitemap), security, redirects from the old site.
- Training, documentation and the warranty after launch.
- Recurring costs: hosting, licences, maintenance, subscriptions.
A quote that stays vague on these points isn’t necessarily cheaper. It pushes the questions to later, when every addition is billed separately. And a higher quote that includes speed, accessibility and maintenance can cost less over three years than a low quote that leaves them out.
How precise a quote is already says something about how serious the provider is. For our projects, an analysis comes before the quote, which details the pages, features and plugins planned. The project is then sold at a fixed price, on that written scope.
Choosing the right web design agency: questions to ask before you sign
Keep this list handy during your meetings:
- Can you show me two sites comparable to mine, still online, and tell me what you did on them?
- Who will do the design and development of my site?
- Can I talk to two of your clients?
- Will the domain name, the hosting and the accounts be in my name, with full administrator access?
- Could another developer take over the site?
- What is included after launch, and what will be billed separately?
- What recurring costs should I plan for each year?
- What happens if the project falls behind, or if I change my mind along the way?
A serious provider answers these questions without hesitation. If they hesitate about who owns your site, you have your answer.
