How to Choose a Website Development Company

A good proposal reads like a contract: what is built, by when, for how much, and what is excluded.

• Scope — pages, templates, features and integrations listed one by one
• Milestones — dates for each increment, with a review at each
• Content — who writes, edits and uploads it
• Integrations — CRM, payments, booking and analytics
• Handover — exactly what you receive on launch day
• Support — what happens after launch, and what it costs

Price follows scope, which is why quotes differ so widely. Our website development cost guide shows what moves the number.

Ask to view the page source of a live site they built. If the text is in the HTML, crawlers can read it.

Google handles JavaScript pages in three stages: crawling, rendering and indexing. It still recommends server-side rendering or pre-rendering, partly because some bots cannot run JavaScript at all. A site that only shows its text after JavaScript runs is a risk for any crawler that does not run it.

• Server-rendered or pre-rendered HTML for every page that should rank
• Titles, descriptions and one H1 per page editable in the CMS
• Structured data (Organization, Service, FAQ) on the right templates
• XML sitemap and robots.txt set up at launch
• Redirects mapped if you are replacing an existing site

These are the basics of technical SEO, which our technical SEO guide explains. Once the site is crawlable, our generative engine optimization services cover getting it cited by AI assistants.

Name Core Web Vitals in the contract, measured on real users, not on the developer’s laptop.

• Largest Contentful Paint — main content in 2.5 seconds or less
• Interaction to Next Paint — 200 milliseconds or less
• Cumulative Layout Shift — 0.1 or less

Google’s web.dev guidance sets these “good” thresholds at the 75th percentile of page loads, checked separately for mobile and desktop.

You should. Domain, hosting, repository, CMS admin and analytics belong in your name from day one.

• Domain and DNS registered to your company
• Source code delivered in a repository you control
• CMS and analytics admin access for your team
• Licences for themes, plugins and fonts documented and transferable

If a company holds any of these, leaving it later costs you time and money.

• Can I see three live sites you built, and their speed and indexing results?
• Who will build my site, and who do I speak to week to week?
• What is not included in this price?
• How do you handle changes after the scope is agreed?
• What do I receive on launch day, and what does support cost afterwards?
• How will I know the site is crawlable and fast?

• A price with no scope — you cannot compare it with anything
• Only mockups, no live sites — design is not delivery
• A promise of rankings — nobody outside Google controls its results
• They keep your domain or code — that is lock-in
• No post-launch terms — “support” is undefined
• No performance numbers — “fast” is not a measure

We scope the work in two weeks, ship in increments to a fixed date, and you approve each increment. The site is built as crawlable HTML with structured data so search engines and AI assistants can read it. See our website development services for the full approach.