What to check in a web design quote before you sign

Most web design quotes are written to describe what you get. Almost none are written to describe what happens to you afterwards, which is where nearly all the risk lives.

These are the questions worth asking. Work through them and you will know more about a supplier than the quote itself will tell you.

Ownership

1. Whose name is the domain registered in?

The most important question on this page. It must be your business, with you as the registrant contact, at an address you control. An agency that registers it in their own name holds your entire online presence, and this is not rare. It is also usually not malicious, just convenient for them and catastrophic for you when the relationship ends. See who owns my website and domain.

2. If I stop paying, what do I keep?

Fair answers: the domain, the content, and an export of the site. A quote that leaves you with nothing is a rental, which can be fine, but you should know that is what you are buying.

3. Who has the logins?

Hosting, domain registrar, Google Business Profile, analytics. You should have administrator access to all of them from day one, not "when you need it".

After launch

4. What does a change cost in year two?

Not year one, which is usually generous. Year two is when a small business changes its prices, adds a service, or replaces a phone number, and where a site quietly goes stale because nobody wants to raise an invoice over a two-word edit.

5. How do I request a change, and how long does it take?

A named person and a working timeframe. "Email us" with no expectation attached tends to mean whenever.

6. Who fixes it if it goes down at the weekend?

Get an actual answer. For a lot of small business sites the honest answer is "Monday morning", which is fine if you know it.

Evidence

7. What proof will I get that it works?

This is the question that separates suppliers. A good answer includes the contact form being tested by submitting one and confirming receipt, the site being fetched with JavaScript disabled to check a crawler can read it, and page speed measured on a phone rather than a desktop.

8. Will the Google Business Profile be claimed and made consistent?

For a local business this matters more than the website. If it is not in scope, that is legitimate, but you need to know so you can do it yourself.

9. What are you doing about the details being the same everywhere?

Your name, address and phone number identical across the site, the profile and any directories, down to the punctuation. Cheap to do at build time, tedious to fix later, and it materially affects local visibility.

Scope and money

10. How many rounds of revisions, and what counts as one?

The old industry answer was two or three, because revisions genuinely cost days. That is much less true now, so a quote with tight revision limits is either priced against an old cost base or expects to make money on the extras.

11. What is explicitly not included?

Copywriting, photography, ongoing hosting, email, and content migration are the usual gaps. Any of them can add meaningfully to the real total.

12. What happens if I want to leave?

Notice period, what you take, and whether there is any charge for a handover. Ask before you sign, when you have leverage, rather than afterwards.

The pattern to look for

You are not really testing knowledge with these. You are testing whether the answers are ready.

A supplier who has thought about the relationship rather than the transaction answers most of them immediately and volunteers the awkward ones. A supplier who has not tends to redirect to the design: more pages, a nicer look, a longer feature list.

That is the tell. The pages are the part that got cheap. Everything on this list is the part that did not, which is the whole argument about pricing in practical form.

And apply it to us as well. If we cannot answer these about our own service, in writing, you should walk.