Your website is your most expensive (and most valuable) marketing asset. It’s your digital storefront, your best sales pitch, and the first impression most people will have of your company.
When it’s time to hire someone to build it, you can’t afford to wing it.
Use this guide to grill potential partners—even us—like you’re on a high-stakes blind date. We’re big fans of the ‘ask anything’ approach, so we made a cheat sheet of must-ask questions for your next meeting.
The Deliverables
Will the site be custom-designed or a template?
Some agencies design every page from scratch based on your brand, your goals, and how your customers take in information. Others start with a pre-built template and customize it.
Let’s clear the air: a template isn’t a shortcut. It allows us to skip the ‘reinventing the wheel’ phase and pour that energy (and your budget) into your brand story and user experience. If implemented properly, it frees up your budget for other important things, like crafting strong messaging and making your brand cohesive.
Buyer Trap: The cheapest proposal is often built around an off-the-shelf template. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you should absolutely ask how the agency plans to tailor it to your business before you sign.
Ask the agency to walk you through how they take a generic template and tailor it to your brand. Request samples so you can see the proof. If they only design custom sites, clarify exactly what you’re getting.
What platform will you build on, and will I have full administrative access?
Your content management system (CMS) is the engine under the hood. If you don’t have the keys, you’re just a passenger on your own website.
Some agencies host your site on their own servers, which means that if the relationship ends, you’ll have to migrate your site on your own. Others build on platforms with proprietary page builders and charge hourly for every update.
Long-Term Cost: A cheaper website can become expensive quickly if your team needs developer support every time you want to update a page, swap a photo, or publish new content.
Ask whether you’ll own the domain, the hosting account, and the admin credentials. By the end of the project, you should walk away with every inch of what you pay for:
- Domain registration in your name
- Full admin access to your CMS
- Hosting account credentials
- All login information documented
What’s your approach to mobile-first design and ADA accessibility?
More than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so your site should be a breeze to use on thumb-sized screens. Ask how the agency approaches responsive design and whether they design for mobile first or adapt the desktop version later.
A site that only works for some people isn’t finished. Period. At a minimum, an accessible site should include:
- Proper color contrast ratios
- Alt text on all images
- Keyboard-friendly navigation
- Screen reader compatibility
- Logical heading structures
If an agency acts like you’re asking for the moon when you bring this up, consider it a big red flag.
The Delivery
Do you write the website copy, or is that on us?
Save yourself from a mid-project meltdown. Writing for a website is a specific skill—you have to juggle your brand voice, SEO, and sales strategy all at once. If an agency hands you a beautiful wireframe filled with ‘Lorem Ipsum’ and expects you to fill in the blanks, they haven’t built you a website; they’ve given you homework.
A Common Pattern: Website projects rarely slow down because of design revisions. They slow down because nobody established a clear plan for the messaging.
Find out up front if they’re creating the strategy and the words, or if you’ll be left staring at a blank Google Doc while your launch date slips away.
How do you make sure the site sounds like us?
Remember that thing we said about your website being a sales pitch? It should actually sound like you’re the one giving it.
Ask potential partners how they plan to capture your brand voice. Are they interviewing your team and listening to your customers, or are they playing follow-the-leader with your industry peers? A partner who relies on your competitors’ sites for inspiration is telling you they don’t know how to find your unique edge.
How do you balance writing for people with writing for search engines and AI-driven search?
Old-school SEO is dying, and AI-powered search is holding the shovel. Your content now has to work for both humans and the AI engines that summarize your business for them. Ask how the agency handles this balancing act. Hint: It’s no longer about trying to outsmart the algorithm; you have to be the most useful resource in your space.
Be wary of anyone who talks exclusively about ranking #1 without mentioning the user experience or the shifting search landscape. You want a partner who builds for the world we live in now, where being helpful is the only way to stay visible.
The Process and Partnership
What’s your content development process? Does design come first, or does messaging drive the layout?
Designing a site before the strategy is like picking out curtains before you’ve built the house. If an agency starts with mood boards and layouts before anyone’s written a word, you’ll end up shoehorning your message into a box it was never meant to fit in.
When the design serves the message, the site feels intentional. When messaging gets crammed into a design, it feels like a generic template that just happens to include your logo.
A website can look polished and still feel confusing if the messaging was forced into a layout that wasn’t built around it.
Who will be my primary point of contact, and will I work directly with the people building the site?
A website project shouldn’t feel like a game of telephone. Communication breakdowns are the #1 reason projects go sideways, so you need to know exactly who’s on the other end of the line. Some agencies use a middleman for everything, while others let you talk directly to the people building your site.
A few green flags to listen for:
- Named contacts with defined roles
- Clear response time expectations
- A consistent communication tool
- A structured feedback process
Whatever the model, if they can’t describe their communication rhythm without a lot of hand-waving, your feedback will get lost in translation
Get the Full Interview Guide
These questions will get you started. But we went even further. The full interview guide includes 15 questions covering everything from post-launch support and hosting to managing feedback from multiple stakeholders and measuring ROI.
Ready to walk into your website agency interviews fully prepared? Download the complete Website Agency Interview Guide with all 15 questions, plus examples of what good answers sound like.
Download the interview guide below—and no, we’re not going to lock it behind a form and then flood your inbox.
