14 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Web Agency

Most people choose a web agency by looking at portfolios. Portfolios are the least informative thing an agency publishes: everyone shows their three best projects, and none of them tell you whether the work was late, over budget, or impossible to edit afterwards.

The conversation tells you far more. Here are the questions worth asking, and what a good answer sounds like.

Before the work

1. What do you need from me to make this succeed?

Ask this first, because it flushes out whether they have thought about the project as a collaboration. A good answer is specific: content by a certain date, access to your logo files, one decision-maker available for approvals, an hour for a kickoff call. A vague answer means you will be the bottleneck and nobody warned you.

2. Who exactly will do the work?

You met the owner. Will the owner build it? A small studio where the person you met does the work is fine. An agency with a team is fine. What is not fine is discovering after signing that everything is subcontracted to someone you never spoke to. Ask directly, and ask whether that changes if the project runs long.

3. What is not included in this price?

Better than asking what is included. Anyone can list features. Honest exclusions — content writing, photography, ongoing SEO, translations, third-party licences — show experience. An agency that says "everything is included" either has not read your brief or is planning to argue about it later.

4. What happens if we go over scope?

There should be an answer, and it should be numeric. An hourly rate for extra work, or a change-request process. "We'll sort it out" is how relationships end badly.

About the work itself

5. What are you going to build it with, and why?

You do not need to understand the answer technically. You need to hear a reason connected to your situation, not just a preference. "WordPress, because you want to edit posts yourself weekly and your team already knows it" is a reason. "WordPress, because that's what we use" is not.

6. Will I be able to edit it myself?

Be precise about what you mean. Editing text on an existing page is not the same as adding a whole new section, which is not the same as building a new page layout. Agree which of those you can do without calling them.

7. How will it perform on a phone on mobile data?

Ask them to open one of their recent client sites on their own phone, in front of you. Half the traffic to most business sites is mobile, and a site that takes eight seconds on 4G loses people before they see anything.

8. Will it meet WCAG AA accessibility?

Since June 2025 the European Accessibility Act applies to most consumer-facing business sites in the EU, and enforcement is real. If the answer is a blank look, that is genuinely useful information about how current their practice is.

9. How do you handle SEO?

You are listening for the difference between technical groundwork and promises. Good: clean URL structure, meta titles and descriptions, structured data, a sitemap, fast pages, Search Console set up, hreflang if multilingual. Bad: guaranteed first-page rankings. Nobody can guarantee that, and the ones who say they can are either lying or planning something that will hurt you later.

About afterwards

10. Who owns the code, the domain and the accounts?

The most important question in this list, and the one asked least. The answer should be that you own all of it. If the domain is registered in the agency's name, or the site only runs on their proprietary platform, you are renting your own business presence.

11. What happens if I want to move to another agency in two years?

A confident answer is short: you take the code and the domain and you go. Any hesitation here is telling you something.

12. What does support cost, and what does it cover?

Distinguish three things: bugs in what they built (should be free for a warranty period), security updates and backups (usually a monthly plan), and new work (hourly or project). If all three are blurred into one number, ask for the breakdown.

13. What is your response time when something breaks?

If your site takes orders, a day of downtime has a price. Ask what happens on a Friday evening, and what the answer costs.

The one that reveals the most

14. Tell me about a project that went wrong.

Every agency has had one. The ones worth hiring will tell you about it plainly: what happened, what they learned, what they changed. The answer tells you how they will behave when your project hits a problem — and every project hits something.

An agency that says nothing has ever gone wrong is either very new or not being straight with you.

Two things to watch for on their side

The questions go both ways. A good agency will ask you things before quoting: what your business does, who your customers are, what you want the site to achieve, how you currently get work, what you would count as success. If a quote arrives without any of that, they are pricing a template.

And be wary of the quote that undercuts everyone else by a wide margin. The work does not disappear because the price went down. It gets moved to you, skipped, or recovered later through changes you did not expect.

How to use this list

Do not read out all fourteen. Pick the five that matter most for your situation and listen to how they are answered as much as what is said. Someone who says "good question, let me think" is usually more reliable than someone with a polished answer to everything.

And ask for two references from clients whose projects finished more than a year ago. Recent clients are still in the honeymoon. The ones from a year back know whether the site kept working, whether support was there, and whether they would do it again.