How to Choose a Web Design Company: Questions to Ask Before You Sign

Many companies choose a website partner on three things: the portfolio, the price and how the first meeting felt. None of those tells you what happens when the Arabic copy is late, when the old site’s best pages disappear from Google after launch, or when the developer who holds the hosting password stops answering. Those are the moments that decide whether a website project goes well, and they can be tested before you sign.

This guide is for the person who has to make the call. It sets out what you are really choosing between, the questions to ask in each area that tends to go wrong, and the answers that should make you pause.

Studio, freelancer or template builder: what you are actually buying

The three options are not better or worse in general. They suit different situations, and each one moves work and risk to a different place.

Our rule of thumb: if the website has to carry company credibility in front of procurement teams, rank for real searches and connect to campaigns, you need someone accountable for content, structure, tracking and care, not just design. A strong freelancer can do that for a small site; a template builder can work for a simple launch page if someone in-house owns it. What fails is choosing a supplier for the design and assuming everything else is included.

Whichever route you take, compare proposals against the same written brief. If you have not prepared one yet, our guide to the sitemap, content and scope to prepare before briefing an agency covers it. The questions below are for the meetings that follow.

Content and bilingual delivery: who writes what, and in which language

In our experience, content is where website projects most often stall. A finished design waiting for copy is still a site you cannot launch. Ask:

• “Who writes the page copy, and is it in the price?” Get the answer per page type: home, about, service pages, product pages, case studies.
• “Is the Arabic written for the market or translated from the English?” For Gulf and Egyptian buyers, a machine-translated Arabic page tends to read as an afterthought. Ask who writes it and who reviews it.
• “How do the language versions sit in the site’s structure?” Each language should have its own URL, linked correctly for search; our guide to Arabic and English website structure explains what to expect in the answer.
• “What happens if our approvals are slow?” A good partner has a content calendar, a clear list of what you owe them and a plan for launching in phases.
• “Who approves content before it goes live?” The answer should be you. Nothing should be published in your company’s name without your sign-off.

The old site: migration and redirects

If your company already has a website, it has history with Google: indexed pages, links from other sites, and searches it already appears for. A redesign that changes URLs can throw that away if nobody plans the move. If you followed our website brief guide, the migration requirements are already in writing. In the meeting, the test is whether the candidate can explain their own process without being prompted, measured against Google’s documentation on site moves with URL changes. Ask:

• “Who builds the URL map, and from what?” A good answer names a person and sources: the current sitemaps, analytics and server logs, which are where Google suggests starting. It should cover images, PDFs and data sheets that buyers have bookmarked, not only pages.
• “What will you do with old pages that have no new equivalent?” Listen for a page-by-page decision. Google advises against redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant destination such as the new home page.
• “How will the redirects be set up, and how long will they stay?” The answer should be server-side permanent (301) redirects straight to the final page, and Google says to keep them “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” Ask who keeps the old domain renewed in that time.
• “What do you check in Search Console, and for how long after launch?” Expect verification of the old and new sites, a new sitemap, a Change of Address request if the domain changes, and a monitoring period with a named owner.
• “What should we expect to happen to our rankings?” An honest partner will say what Google says: visibility “may fluctuate temporarily during the move”, and for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones in results.

Also ask what else is tied to the old site: forms, inquiry email routing and any tracking tags that need to move with it.

Tracking, accounts and ownership: what is in your name

Problems here often surface years later, typically when a company changes supplier and discovers it does not control its own website. Before you sign, agree in writing who owns and administers each of these:

The analytics point matters more than it seems. In Google Analytics, adding or changing users requires the Administrator role at the account or property level, and deleting users requires Administrator at the account level, according to Google’s help page on managing users. If the supplier holds the only administrator role, you are asking permission to see your own data.

On tracking itself, ask what will be measured at launch: form submissions, WhatsApp clicks, calls, quotation requests. A site that cannot tell you where inquiries came from will be judged on opinion instead of results.

This is how RX works on its own website projects: clients approve content before it goes out, ad accounts stay in the client’s name, and clients receive the final and source files and rights at handover. Whoever you hire, ask for the same in writing. For questions about contract wording or intellectual property, check with a lawyer.

After launch: care, security and who answers the phone

A website is not finished at launch. Plugins and themes keep changing, and new vulnerabilities in them are published every week, so “we’ll update plugins when you ask” is not a care plan. Our guide to what a WordPress care plan should cover sets out the backups, monitoring and response times to ask for.

Ask every candidate:

• “What happens in the first month after launch?” Look for a defined stabilisation period covering bug fixes, redirect checks and tracking checks.
• “What does ongoing care include, and what is extra?” Updates, backups, monitoring, small content changes, response times.
• “How many plugins will the site use, and why each one?” Fewer, well-maintained plugins mean fewer things to patch.
• “Can our team edit pages without breaking the design?” Ask for a live demonstration on a page like the ones you will update most.
• “If we stop working together, what do we receive and how fast?” The exit plan says more about a partner than the sales pitch.

Gulf-specific questions most checklists miss

The questions above apply anywhere. These five come up specifically when the site is for a company selling in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt or Qatar, and generic agency checklists rarely include them.

• “Who tests the Arabic version on a phone before launch, and what do they check?” A good answer names a person and lists the checks: menus and forms mirrored right to left, Arabic text mixed with English product names and numbers displaying in the right order, and Arabic fonts that stay readable at mobile sizes.
• “Who will be the registrant of the .sa, .ae or .eg domain, and what will the registry need from us?” The answer should be your company, not the agency. Registries set their own rules: SaudiNIC says non-government applicants register only through licensed registrars, and its regulations include criteria for a reasonable relationship between the domain name and the registrant. For a .com.eg domain, a company inside Egypt needs its commercial register extract or tax card and a copy of the ID of the owner or the person it authorises (domain.eg). For .ae, check the registry’s current policy with your registrar.
• “Where will the hosting, backups and form submissions be stored?” Contact and quotation forms collect personal data, and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Qatar each have data protection rules. A good partner names the server and backup locations and builds the consent wording and privacy page your legal adviser approves; our articles on Saudi PDPL consent and Egypt’s data protection licensing cover two of those markets.
• “Which licence and registration details will the footer and contact page show?” Buyers and procurement teams look for the legal name, licence or registration details and a physical address. For UAE sites, our guide to UAE website legal requirements and trust signals lists what to include.
• “Are all prices quoted with or without VAT, including the recurring items?” Both figures should be stated line by line, so a VAT difference does not decide the comparison for you.

A scoring sheet for the final two candidates

By the end of the meetings you will usually have two serious options. Score each one from 1 to 5 on the areas that predict how the project will actually go, not on how the portfolio looks.

For the last row, open the live sites yourself on your phone. Check the Arabic version, submit a contact form, and look at how fast the pages load. A screenshot portfolio tells you about design; a live site tells you about delivery. For example, the website RX built for Alraghad Transport, a UAE freight company, has a full Arabic version, shipment requests and shipment tracking: functions you can open and test yourself, which is the point of checking live work rather than screenshots.

If you want a second reader, bring your two shortlisted proposals to a business diagnosis session and we will score them with you against this sheet.

Finally, ask each candidate for one thing that went wrong on a past project and what they changed afterwards. A partner who cannot give a specific answer is telling you something about how they handle problems.