A fair share of our projects begin as rescues: a business arrives with a year-old website, a drained budget and a WhatsApp thread that stopped getting replies. Almost every rescue traces back to the same original sin — the agency was chosen on portfolio pictures and price alone.
Portfolios show taste. They do not show whether the site sold anything, whether it launched on time, or whether the team answered the phone in month three. For that you need better questions. Here are the seven we would ask if we were hiring an agency ourselves.
1. "What did this site earn?"
Point at any project in their portfolio and ask what changed commercially after launch. A serious agency talks about enquiry rates, order values or booking volumes without checking their notes. If the answer is a shrug wrapped in words like "engagement", keep looking.
2. "Who exactly will work on my project?"
The people in the pitch meeting are not always the people doing the work. Ask to meet the actual designer and developer before signing. If production is outsourced overseas, that is not automatically bad — but you deserve to know, because it changes how fast problems get fixed.
3. "What do you need from me, and when?"
Websites go late because of content far more often than code. An experienced agency hands you a content schedule in week one and chases you about it. An inexperienced one stays polite until the deadline is already dead.
4. "What happens if we launch and the numbers are bad?"
This is the question most agencies hope you never ask. Listen for a concrete process — monitoring, a tuning period, someone accountable. "We can discuss a maintenance package" is a no dressed as a yes.
5. "Can I speak to a client from two years ago?"
Fresh references are easy; every agency has a client currently in the honeymoon phase. A client from two years back tells you what support actually looks like once the invoices stop.
6. "What will make this project fail?"
Good agencies have scars and talk about them. If a team cannot name a project that went sideways and what they changed afterwards, they are either very new or very selective with the truth. Neither is comforting.
7. "Why this price?"
Quotes in Malaysia for the same brief can range from RM3,000 to RM90,000. Cheap usually means a template with your logo on it — fine for some businesses, wrong for others. Expensive should mean research, custom build and post-launch accountability. Ask each bidder to explain what their number buys, then compare the explanations, not the numbers.
The pattern behind all seven
Every question above is really the same question: does this agency treat a website as a picture or as a machine? Pictures are judged in the pitch meeting. Machines are judged every month after launch, in analytics your accountant can read. Hire the agency that volunteers to be judged that way.
If you want to hear how we answer these seven ourselves, book a call — question four is our favourite.