How to choose a web agency (6 questions to ask)

Most guides to hiring an agency tell you to look at the portfolio and read some reviews. That's table stakes, and it barely predicts how the actual project will go. A slick portfolio tells you an agency can produce good work under ideal conditions, with a client who had a clear brief and no timeline pressure. It doesn't tell you what happens when your requirements change three weeks in, or your launch date moves up, or the founder and the head of product disagree on a design direction.

Here's what we'd actually ask, if we were on the other side of the table.

"Who's writing my code?"

Some agencies sell the work in-house and quietly subcontract it to a team you'll never speak to. There's nothing inherently wrong with subcontracting, but you should know about it upfront, because it changes accountability. If something goes wrong post-launch, are you talking to the person who built it, or a project manager relaying messages to someone else?

Ask directly: "who, by name, will be writing the code on my project?"

"What happens if I want to leave halfway through?"

This question tells you more about an agency's confidence than almost anything else. A good agency will tell you exactly what you own at each milestone, whether that's Figma files, a design system, or working code in a repo you control. If the answer is vague, or the contract locks your code and assets behind a support retainer, that's a signal worth weighing.

"What do I not get for this budget?"

Ask this before you ask what's included. Agencies are generally good at describing scope; they're less forthcoming about exclusions, because exclusions are where scope creep and change-order fees come from later. An agency that volunteers this information without being pushed is one that isn't planning to pad the invoice mid-project.

"Can I talk to a client whose project didn't go smoothly?"

Everyone can produce a happy reference. Ask for the opposite: a project that hit a snag, and how it got resolved. How an agency handles friction, a scope disagreement, a missed deadline, a bug found post-launch, tells you far more about working with them than a highlight reel does.

"What's your actual process, day to day?"

Vague answers like "agile" or "we're very collaborative" aren't answers. Ask what a typical week looks like: how often you'll hear from them, what format updates come in, how decisions get made when the team disagrees with your instinct. Mismatched expectations about communication cadence are one of the most common reasons client relationships sour, independent of the quality of the actual work.

"What happens after launch?"

A website isn't done at launch, it's just live. Ask what support is included afterward, for how long, and what it costs once that window ends. An agency that disappears the day after deployment has optimised for closing the sale, not for the relationship.

The pattern behind all of these

Every question above is really asking the same thing: does this agency behave the same way under pressure as they do in the pitch? Portfolios show you the best-case output. These questions show you the process, and process is what determines outcome when the project inevitably deviates from the plan.

If you want to see how we answer these for ourselves, we've written up our actual process and a transparent breakdown of what different budgets buy.

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Happy to answer any of the above directly. Get in touch and ask us the hard questions first.