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How to choose a web development agency: ten questions, the red flags, and how to read the quote

How to choose a web development agency: ten questions to ask before you sign, the answers that should worry you, and how to read the quote.

The man who sells reconditioned outboard engines from a shed in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer brought me the contract from his web development agency in June, and he'd gone over one clause in yellow highlighter, number 11 on page six. It said the domain, the hosting account and "all source code" would stay with the agency "until full payment of all sums due, including the maintenance subscription." I asked him when the maintenance subscription ended. He didn't know, and as far as I could see from the contract, nobody did, since there wasn't an end date in it. It was €95 a month.

My answer, for what it's worth from someone who runs a small studio, is that you choose a web development agency on three answers you get in writing before you look at mockups: who builds the site, whose name the domain and code are registered in, and what year two costs all in. The engine seller had none of the three. €6,800 for the site in 2023, roughly €3,400 of maintenance since, and then €1,200, which the agency said was the price of transferring his domain to him.

Agency, freelancer or studio

The way I tell them apart is by who's on the first call. At most agencies it's a director or somebody from sales, and the work goes to a team you'll meet later, or never. With a freelancer it's the one person who'll write all of it. A studio is somewhere in between, a few people at most, where whoever pitched you is whoever builds, and in my case that's me, at a bench in La Ciotat in the south of France.

You'd expect the price to follow headcount, and it does, though not as closely as you'd think. Clutch, the directory where agencies collect client reviews, says most of the web development companies it lists bill $25 to $49 an hour and most projects come in under $10,000, and then further down the same page it gives the average project in its reviews as $66,499 over nine months, which I read as a few very big builds dragging the average up. I've laid out the price bands in a post on what a website actually costs.

For a brochure site a good freelancer is hard to beat on price, and there are plenty of them: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 18% of US web developers as self-employed.

Design or development?

People type "web development vs design" into Google as if they had to choose, and you don't: you need both. The BLS describes the split much the way the trade does: web developers create and maintain sites and look after performance and capacity, while digital designers work out the layout, functions and navigation and test whether people can actually use them. The pay differs as well. In May 2025 the median was $92,650 for web developers and $104,000 for web and digital interface designers.

Ten questions to ask a web development agency

  1. Who's going to build my site, by name, and can I speak to that person before I sign?
  2. Whose name goes on the domain registration? It ought to be yours, with your own email address on the registrar account. ICANN's page for registrants says the registrant assumes "sole responsibility for the registration and use" of the name, so in practice whoever is on that record owns it.
  3. When do I get the code and the admin logins, at launch or after the final payment?
  4. What will I pay in the second year, all in? Hosting, the domain, licenses, and the plugins that renew every March.
  5. Can you send me three sites you launched in the last eighteen months, and the phone number of one of the owners?
  6. Which platform, and why that one for my business?
  7. Who writes the text and supplies the photos, and what if I'm late with them?
  8. How many rounds of revisions are included?
  9. What's the launch date, on a calendar?
  10. If the contact form stops working on a Saturday in August, who answers the phone?

Number 5 is the one I'd spend the most time on. Open the three sites on your phone, outside, on mobile data rather than the office Wi-Fi. The HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac found only 48% of mobile websites pass all three of Google's Core Web Vitals, so if an agency's launches pass, they bothered. When the engine seller phoned two of his old agency's references for me, one of the owners said he'd hire them again, and the other one laughed and asked how long we had.

Number 6 gets skipped more often than it should. The same Almanac puts WordPress behind roughly 64% of the sites that run a CMS, and I have nothing against it, but Patchstack logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and 46% had no fix from the developer by the time they were made public. A site with thirty plugins is a site somebody has to update every month, which brings you back to question 4. I go through the longer version in my comparison of WordPress, Wix and a custom website.

Answers that should worry you

Last winter a dentist in Aubagne showed me a proposal that promised her, in writing, first place on Google for "dentiste Aubagne" within ninety days. Google has a page about hiring an SEO that says "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google," and the same page warns you about agencies that email you out of the blue, which is how that proposal had reached her.

When you hear "don't worry, we'll look after the domain for you," which is more or less what the engine seller was told, I'd ask in whose name and ask to see the registrar account, there and then if you can.

Reading the quote

The best quote I've read this year came from a two-person shop in Toulon, for a physiotherapy practice, and it fit on one page. There were nine lines with a number of days next to each, for the brief, the design, the build, the redirects, entering the content, the cookie banner, the launch, an hour of training and a month of fixes afterward. The worst one had a line that just said "development: €9,000" with nothing underneath it. Even at €120 an hour, well above the $25 to $49 Clutch says most of its agencies bill, that's 75 hours, so I think you're entitled to ask what's in them.

What's missing tells you about as much. Copywriting is left off nearly every quote I see, and it ends up landing on the client, as does photography. On a redesign the redirects from the old addresses are the line that protects your Google traffic, and I've written about how that goes wrong. Then the privacy policy, the cookie banner, and an hour of training so you can change your own opening hours.

As for the engine seller, he got the domain back, though not quickly. He wrote the agency a letter quoting their own clause back at them, and I tidied up the French. Eleven days and €400 later (an "administrative fee," which had started at €1,200) the transfer code arrived, and the new site took three weeks from there.

If you've got a quote in front of you and want a second pair of eyes on it, I can usually go through one in a fifteen-minute call.

FAQ

How much does a web development agency charge?

Clutch's pricing page says most of the web development companies it lists charge $25 to $49 an hour, that most projects are under $10,000, and that the average across its reviews is $66,499. A brochure site for a small business is at the bottom of that. Mine start at €1,900 before VAT, around $2,200, and a web app with logins or payments starts at €9,000. Clutch also puts the average project at nine months, while a brochure site from me takes two to four weeks.

What is the difference between web development and web design?

The BLS puts it this way: digital designers plan the layout, functions and navigation and test them with users, and web developers build the site and look after its speed and capacity. They are paid differently, too: a median of $104,000 against $92,650 in May 2025.

Should I hire a freelancer or an agency to build my website?

For a brochure site I think a good freelancer or a small studio usually gets you more for your money, because there are fewer people to pay between you and the code. An agency makes more sense if you need a brand, a film and ads delivered at the same time as the site, or support around the clock. Either way I'd make sure the domain is in your name.

How do I find a good web development agency near me?

Clutch's directory lets you filter web development companies by city, and Google Maps will show you the ones nearby with reviews, but I'd start with sites you like in your own trade and ask the owners who built them. Then try that agency's sites on your phone and call one of its clients. How quickly an agency answers matters more than how close it is; I've got a client in Boston I've met once, for a coffee in Cassis. If you're near Marseille, I've written about what hiring a web agency there involves.

Sources

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