Portfolios are curated, references are pre-selected and every proposal sounds competent. These are the checks that distinguish suppliers before you have paid anything.

Every supplier you shortlist will show attractive work and describe a sensible process. The differences that predict how the project will go are visible earlier than most buyers look: in how they read your brief, what they ask, whether their examples are live, and who you will actually be talking to in week six.

Read the portfolio properly

Open the sites, do not look at the screenshots. Check they are still live and still look like the case study; a portfolio full of sites that have since been replaced tells you something about how they age. On a phone, check whether the layout holds. Read the copy: if every site in the portfolio says something specific about a business, the supplier can think; if they all look beautiful and say nothing, you are buying decoration.

  • Are the sites live, and do they match the case study?
  • Do they work on a phone, honestly?
  • Does the writing on those sites do any work?

Look for projects like yours, not clients like you

A supplier who has built for your exact industry is nice to have. A supplier who has solved your exact problem, such as a site with several content types, a migration protecting search traffic, or a complex offer made simple, is worth more. Industry familiarity is learned in a week; structural judgement is not.

Judge them by the questions they ask

This is the strongest available signal. A supplier who responds to your brief with questions about your customers, your evidence and who approves decisions is doing the work already. One who responds with a price and a timeline has fitted you to a template. Ask each shortlisted supplier what they would need to know before quoting, and compare the answers rather than the quotes.

Find out who does the work

In an agency, the people in the pitch are often not the people on the project. Ask directly: who designs it, who builds it, who you speak to weekly, and how many people sit between you and them. Neither answer is disqualifying, but you should know which one you are buying. With an independent designer the answer is trivially clear, which is part of what you are choosing.

Ask what they will not do

Every supplier has limits: capacity, technologies they avoid, projects they turn down. One who claims none has either not thought about it or is not telling you. The specific answer also tells you where their judgement lives, and a supplier willing to say "an agency would serve you better for this" at the pitch stage is one you can believe later.

Check how they handle what goes wrong

Ask about a project that went badly and what changed afterwards. You are listening for whether they take any share of the responsibility. "The client kept changing their mind" is a complaint; "we did not name a single approver, so now we do" is a process. The second answer is what you want on the phone when your own project hits a problem.

Compare proposals on assumptions, not totals

Send every supplier the same brief and read what each assumed: who writes the content, how many feedback rounds, what happens to the old URLs, what is excluded. Two quotes within ten percent of each other can describe wildly different amounts of work. The assumptions are where the real price lives.

Warning signs worth acting on

Free design concepts offered before discovery, because whoever produced them designed without information and will do it again. Guaranteed rankings, which nobody can promise. A price quoted before anyone asked what the site is for. Pressure to sign this week. A portfolio of sites that are all offline. And templated proposals with your company name pasted into a document written for someone else, which tells you exactly how much attention the project will get.

Practical decision checklist

  • Open every portfolio site, on a phone as well.
  • Look for a comparable problem, not a comparable industry.
  • Score suppliers on the questions they ask you.
  • Establish who does the work and who you speak to.
  • Ask what they turn down and what went wrong once.
  • Send one brief to everyone and compare assumptions.
  • Walk away from guaranteed rankings and free concepts.

Frequently asked questions

How many suppliers should I approach?

Three to five. Fewer gives you nothing to compare; more reduces the effort each one puts into the response, because they can estimate their odds.

Should I ask for references?

Yes, and ask the referee a specific question rather than whether they were happy: what surprised them, what they would do differently, how changes were handled. Pre-selected references still give away a lot when asked precisely.

Is a local supplier better?

It matters less than it used to, and it matters most when the project needs photography, workshops or frequent in-person meetings. Time zone and language usually matter more than distance.

What if the best proposal is the most expensive?

Compare what each price includes before treating it as expensive. If the difference is content production, migration work or a proper discovery phase, the cheaper quote has moved that cost onto you or removed it from the project.