How do I choose a website redesign agency?

Most people pick an agency by looking at portfolios. That tells you what they can make look nice. It tells you almost nothing about whether the finished site will bring you work.

Here's what actually separates the ones worth hiring.

They ask questions before they give you a price

If someone quotes before they understand what the site has to do, they're pricing pages, not results. The first conversation should be mostly questions. Where do your enquiries come from now? Which pages already pull traffic? What do customers get stuck on? What does the site need to achieve, in numbers?

No questions, no diagnosis. You'll get a site that looks better and performs exactly the same.

They can tell you what happens to your rankings

Ask this one directly. What happens to my Google rankings when we move?

It's the most revealing question you can ask, and it's where most redesigns go wrong. A good answer covers URL mapping, permanent redirects in place before launch, keeping the content that already earns traffic, and speed benchmarked before and after.

A vague answer is a warning. A confident “it'll be fine” is a bigger one. Rebuilding without redirects is how businesses lose years of search equity in an afternoon.

They show results, not screenshots

A portfolio proves someone can make a nice-looking site. Ask what happened next. Did enquiries go up? Did it get faster? Did rankings hold?

If nobody measured it, nobody was accountable for it.

They'll talk you out of it

The most useful thing an agency can tell you is that you don't need what you came for.

Sometimes the site's fine and nobody can find it. That's a visibility problem, not a design one. Sometimes two pages need work, not thirty. An agency willing to lose the bigger sale is telling you how they'll behave once they've got your money.

It's why we'd rather talk through redesign versus rebuilding from scratch before quoting anyone.

You own what you paid for

Ask who holds the domain, the hosting and the CMS login when it's done. The answer should be you, no argument.

Ask if you can edit the site yourself afterwards. Ask whether ongoing support is a choice or a condition. Being locked in because someone else holds the keys is a bad place to be, and it's avoidable.

Local helps, but it isn't the deciding factor

Working with someone nearby is genuinely useful. Face to face conversations, shared understanding of the local market, someone who knows what your customers are actually like.

But it matters less than diagnosis, accountability and technical competence. A good remote agency beats a mediocre local one. Treat it as a tiebreaker, not a requirement.

The questions worth asking

• What will you do to protect my current rankings?
• Which of my existing pages are worth keeping, and how did you decide?
• What does success look like in numbers, and who's measuring it?
• Who owns the domain, hosting and logins at the end?
• Can I edit it myself, and what does support cost?
• What would make you tell me not to do this?

That last one's the giveaway. Anyone who can't answer it has never turned work down.