We run a web design studio in Bangalore, so we’re not exactly a neutral party here. But after seven years of building websites, we’ve seen the same handful of problems come up again and again when an agency hire goes wrong. Most of them are avoidable if you ask the right questions early.
This is the checklist we’d give a friend who asked us how to pick an agency in India. It should also help you work out whether we’re the right fit, or whether someone else is.
Start with what the website has to do
Before you compare anyone, write down the job the site needs to do. Not how it should look. What it has to achieve. Bring in enquiries? Take bookings? Sell products? Show up when people nearby search for what you offer?
It sounds obvious, but it changes who you should be talking to. A five-page site for a consultancy and an online store with a few hundred products are very different projects, and plenty of agencies are excellent at one and quietly average at the other. If you can describe the job in two or three sentences, the quotes you get back will be much easier to compare.
Look at live websites, not screenshots
Anyone can put together a nice portfolio page. Mockups on Behance or Dribbble show what a designer can draw, which isn’t the same thing as what an agency can ship.
Ask for links to sites they’ve built that are live right now. Then open them on your phone, on mobile data rather than office Wi-Fi. Do they load quickly? Do the menus work? Does the contact form actually send? You can also paste a link into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool and get a performance score in about thirty seconds. Five minutes of this tells you more than an hour-long pitch.
If an agency can’t share any live links, ask why. There are sometimes good reasons, like confidentiality agreements or white-label work done for other agencies, but they should still be able to show you something real on a call.
Find out who will actually build it
This is the question most people forget to ask, and it causes more trouble than any other.
Some agencies win the project with their most senior people on the call, then hand the actual work to a junior team or pass it to a freelancer you’ll never speak to. That isn’t automatically bad, but you deserve to know. Ask plainly: who will design this, who will develop it, and who will I talk to every week? If the answer is vague, or the names change between the sales call and the kickoff, take note.
Get a fixed price for a written scope
Hourly estimates are where budgets go to grow. Ask for a fixed price tied to a written scope that covers which pages you’re getting, which features, how many rounds of revisions, and what happens after launch.
A good proposal also says what isn’t included. That part matters more than people think. “Copywriting not included” or “product uploads billed separately” isn’t a catch. It’s honesty, and it means a second invoice won’t surprise you halfway through.
Staged payments are normal: a deposit to start, a payment when you sign off the design, and the rest at launch. Be careful with anyone who wants the full amount upfront for a project that will take weeks.
Make sure you’ll own everything
This one is boring until the day it isn’t. Your domain should be registered in your name, on your own account. Ideally the hosting too. You should get admin access to the website and, for custom builds, the code.
It’s surprisingly common for a business to be unable to change its own phone number on its own website because a previous agency holds every login and has stopped replying. Get ownership written into the agreement before any work starts.
Pay attention to how they talk to you
The way an agency communicates before you’ve paid them is the best version of how they’ll communicate afterwards. If replies take three days during the sales process, they won’t get faster once the project starts.
If you’re outside India, ask how their working hours overlap with yours and how often you’ll get updates. In summer, Bangalore is four and a half hours ahead of London and nine and a half hours ahead of New York. A well-run agency will have a clear answer about overlap hours, weekly updates and how to reach someone if the site goes down, rather than a vague “we’re flexible”.
Red flags worth walking away from
A few things should make you pause:
- A guarantee of first-page Google rankings. Nobody controls that, and anyone promising it is either guessing or planning something you won’t like.
- “Lifetime free maintenance” with no detail on what it covers.
- No written scope, just a price and a message saying “don’t worry, we’ll handle everything”.
- Reluctance to put the domain or hosting in your name.
- A portfolio made up entirely of templates you could buy yourself on ThemeForest.
One of these on its own doesn’t mean an agency is dishonest. A few of them together usually means a stressful few months.
Questions to ask on the first call
If you take only one thing from this guide, take these questions. Ask every agency the same ones and compare the answers side by side:
- Can you show me three live sites you’ve built in the last year?
- Who will design and develop my site, and who will I speak to each week?
- Is this a fixed price, and what exactly does it include?
- How many revision rounds do I get, and what counts as a revision?
- Will the domain, hosting and code be in my name?
- What happens after launch if something breaks?
The agency with the clearest answers is usually the one that’s easiest to work with. It’s rarely the cheapest, and it’s rarely the most expensive either.
Where we fit
We’re GN Tech, a design and development studio in Bangalore. Since 2019 we’ve delivered more than 200 websites for businesses in 11 countries, from the UK and USA to Australia, the UAE and Singapore. We’re happy to answer every question above before you decide anything. If you’d like us to be one of the agencies you compare, send us a short brief and you’ll get a fixed-price proposal within 48 hours.
Web Design
Custom web design by Indian web designers, built to turn visitors into customers