This is uncomfortable territory for an agency to write about, since some of what follows could be aimed at us. That is rather the point: these are the questions we would want a client to ask, because a client who asks them is a client who will not be surprised later.
They talk about design and never about customers
A sales conversation that stays on aesthetics — colours, sliders, animations, how modern it will look — has skipped the only question that determines whether the site works: who is arriving, what are they trying to do, and what makes them pick you.
A builder who is good at this will spend more of the first conversation asking about your business than describing theirs. If nobody asks who your customers are, nobody is designing for them.
Guaranteed rankings
Nobody can guarantee a position in search results. Not for 'number one on Google', not for a specific keyword, not for a timeframe. The company running the results makes no such guarantees to anyone.
What can be promised is process: proper structure, real content, fast pages, clean technical setup, consistent local details. That is legitimate work with real effects. A guarantee of position is either ignorance or a deliberate lie, and neither is who you want holding your domain.
Watch for the softer version too: 'we'll get you ranking'. Same claim, deniable phrasing.
The proposal has no specifics in it
A proposal that says 'professional website design — $X' with three bullet points is not a proposal, it is a price tag. It gives you nothing to hold anyone to.
A real one states: how many pages and which ones, who writes the copy, who provides photography, what functionality is included, how many revisions, what the timeline is with dates, what happens after launch, and what it costs to change something in six months.
Vagueness at proposal stage is not carelessness. It is where scope disputes come from later, and the ambiguity rarely resolves in your favour.
Evasiveness about the domain
Ask directly: will the domain be registered in my name, in my own account? Any answer other than a straight yes is a serious problem. There is no technical reason an agency needs to own your domain, and 'we manage that for you' is not a reason, it is a hostage arrangement waiting to happen.
This is the single highest-stakes question in the whole process, which is why it is worth understanding what website ownership actually consists of before you sign anything.
You cannot see recent, real, live work
Not screenshots. Not mockups. Live URLs of sites they built, for businesses like yours, in the last year or two.
Then check them yourself. Load them on your phone on cellular data and see how long they take. Try to call the business from the site with one tap. Look at whether the copy sounds like a real business or like filler. If the portfolio pieces are slow and generic, that is what you are buying.
Calling one or two of those businesses to ask how the project went is unusual and enormously informative. Almost nobody does it.
Pressure, deadlines and disappearing discounts
'This price is only good until Friday.' 'We have one build slot left this month.' Sometimes true. Usually a technique, and one that is specifically designed to prevent you from doing the checks above.
A builder confident in their work is comfortable with you taking a week. Urgency manufactured on their side is a signal about their pipeline, not about your opportunity.
Everything is included and nothing is explained
Packages that bundle a website with SEO, social media management, ads and reputation management for one monthly figure are hard to evaluate on purpose. You cannot tell what any component costs, so you cannot tell what is being under-delivered.
The common pattern is a cheap site subsidised by ongoing services that are largely automated. Ask what specifically happens each month and how it is reported. 'Ongoing SEO' with no monthly deliverable is often a subscription to a spreadsheet nobody reads.
No one will say what happens if you leave
Ask what leaving looks like and listen for a clean answer: notice period, what you take with you, whether there is an exit fee, how the domain transfers, whether you get your data.
Discomfort with this question is diagnostic. An arrangement designed to be fair is easy to describe. An arrangement designed to be sticky is not.
The site is not their business
A builder whose own website is slow, dated or full of generic template copy is telling you something. So is one who cannot explain, in plain language, why their pages are structured the way they are.
This cuts both ways and it is a fair standard to hold anyone to, including us.
Signs you found a good one
- They asked more about your customers than about your colour preferences.
- They told you something you did not need — a feature to skip, a page not worth building.
- The proposal is specific enough to argue with.
- They were clear about the domain, the data and the exit without being pushed.
- They showed something concrete early rather than asking you to imagine it.
- They were comfortable with you taking your time.
None of that guarantees a great outcome. But every one of these is cheap to check before money changes hands, and expensive to discover after.