Most website briefs go wrong before a single page is designed. They go wrong in the sales call, when a business owner is too polite, too rushed, or too unfamiliar with the process to ask the questions that actually matter. Then six months later they’re stuck with a site nobody else can touch, a support ticket queue instead of a phone number, and a hosting bill that keeps changing for reasons nobody explains.
You don’t need to become a web developer to avoid this. You need nine questions, asked before you sign anything, and the patience to notice when an answer is vague.
Who will actually build my site?
Ask this one first, because the person pitching you is often not the person building anything. Larger agencies routinely sell you a senior creative director in the meeting and hand the project to a rotating cast of junior staff or subcontractors once the contract’s signed.
Ask who you’ll actually be emailing once the project starts, and whether that’s the same person in the pitch. If the answer involves an account manager whose job is to relay messages to “the team,” you’ve found your first red flag. A good agency will tell you plainly who’s doing the design, who’s doing the build, and how to reach them directly.
What happens after the site goes live?
A website is not a one-off purchase, it’s a living system that needs updates, security patches, and the occasional fix when a plugin update breaks something. Ask what happens the day after launch. Is ongoing support included, bolted on as a separate contract, or simply not offered at all?
Also ask what “support” means in practice. Is it a same-day phone call with someone who understands the build, or a ticket that joins a queue behind fifty other clients? We run our own support without a ticketing system for exactly this reason: when something breaks, you want the person who built it, not a triage process.
Is hosting included, and what does “unlimited” actually mean?
Hosting is where a lot of agencies quietly pad their margins, reselling cheap shared hosting at a markup while calling it “premium” or “unlimited.” Ask exactly what’s included: server specifications, backups, uptime monitoring, and what happens if your site gets a genuine traffic spike.
“Unlimited” hosting almost always means shared infrastructure with a fair use policy buried in the terms. There’s no such thing as unlimited server resources. If an agency can’t tell you plainly what you’re actually getting, assume it’s the cheapest tier they can get away with.
Is the price fixed, and what’s excluded?
Scope creep is the single biggest source of agency disputes. Before you sign, get the price fixed and get the exclusions in writing: how many rounds of revisions are included, whether stock photography or copywriting is extra, what a “page” means if your site needs more than the number quoted.
We scope every project as a fixed fee before work starts, starting from £2,500 (ex. VAT) for a full build, precisely so a client knows the number on day one is the number at the end. If an agency won’t commit to a number until “we understand your requirements better” three meetings in, that’s worth noticing.
Who owns the code and content once it’s built?
This sounds like a formality until you try to leave. Some agencies build on proprietary page builders or custom frameworks that only they can maintain, which quietly locks you in: leaving means a rebuild, not a migration.
Ask, in plain terms: if we part ways in two years, can we take the site and the content to someone else without starting from scratch? A straight answer here tells you a lot about whether an agency is confident in its work or relying on lock-in to keep you.
Can I see something they’ve actually built, not just designed?
A polished mockup is not a website. Ask to see live sites the agency has built, not case study screenshots, and click around them on your phone. Check load speed, check whether the navigation makes sense, check whether it actually looks designed on a small screen rather than just resized down from desktop.
Anyone can show you attractive Figma files. Fewer agencies can show you five live sites they built two years ago that still load fast and haven’t needed a rebuild.
How do they handle SEO and PPC?
Be wary of any agency that claims to be brilliant at everything: design, build, SEO, and paid ads, all under one roof. Search marketing is a specialist discipline in its own right, and an agency treating it as an add-on service usually means it’s an afterthought, staffed by whoever’s free that week.
We don’t run SEO or PPC in-house. We build the site properly, on solid technical foundations, and refer clients to two specialist partners we trust, Seeded Digital and Leapfrog Internet Marketing, for the ongoing search work. Ask any agency you’re considering whether search marketing is a genuine specialism or a line item added to make the proposal look more complete.
What’s the actual timeline, and what could change it?
Get a realistic build timeline, and ask what depends on you. Most delays on web projects come from the client side, slow content delivery, late sign-off, indecision on imagery, not the agency. A good agency will tell you this upfront and build a process around it, rather than quietly letting the deadline slip and blaming “scope.”
What happens if something breaks on a Friday evening?
This is the question that reveals whether an agency is a design studio dressed up as a technical partner, or the other way round. Ask what actually happens if your site goes down, gets hacked, or breaks at an inconvenient time. Is there someone who picks up the phone, or are you filling in a form and waiting for a response during business hours on Monday?
You don’t need this answered with a marketing promise. You need it answered with a process: who monitors the site, how quickly they respond, and whether that’s covered by your contract or billed separately as an emergency call-out.
None of these questions are complicated, and none of them require technical knowledge to ask. What they require is asking them before you sign, not after something’s gone wrong. The agencies that answer plainly are usually the ones worth hiring. The ones that get vague, defensive, or start talking about “circling back” are telling you something too.
