Hiring a web agency after you've been burned: the questions, the contract, the proof

Name the failure before shopping for a replacement, because three different failures look identical from the outside and have different questions attached.

"They disappeared" was no handover terms — ask what termination delivers, in writing. "We paid for a year and nothing moved" was no named deliverable — ask what you will do monthly, itemized. "We don't own our own site" was no assignment clause — ask whether they will assign copyright on final payment. "The rebuild lost our traffic" was no redirect map — ask who maps the old URLs, and when.

The last one has a documented standard behind it rather than a preference: Google's guidance on site moves with URL changes treats redirecting old addresses to their equivalents as the baseline of a migration. An agency that cannot describe that process has not done one carefully.

Ask the ones whose answers are documents. A portfolio is a sample of the work; a contract is a sample of the relationship.

The ownership three, in writing. Will you assign copyright in the deliverables to us, and when? The Copyright Office sets out why this is necessary rather than courteous in Circular 30, and the underlying definition is 17 USC 101. A website is not one of the nine commissioned categories, so the default is that the agency owns it. Who is the registrant on the domain? ICANN's Registrant Rights and Responsibilities sets out what that record entitles you to, and it should be your name, today. Which accounts will be in our name — hosting, DNS, repository, analytics, Search Console?

The delivery three. What is the page count and the rate? A number you can audit beats a project price. What does the monthly include, itemized, with evidence? What happens on termination — source, database, DNS, assignment?

The proof three. The Search Console export behind one claimed result — not the slide it was pasted into. A live URL whose Core Web Vitals field data we can check ourselves. One thing you got wrong on a build and what you changed afterwards.

That last one is the one that separates agencies. An agency with no answer has either never shipped enough to have one or will not tell you.

On the export specifically, the claim behind it is regulated and that is leverage. A case study or a client testimonial is advertising, and under the FTC's Endorsement Guides an advertiser needs substantiation for the claims an endorsement conveys. So asking an agency for the data behind “we tripled their leads” is asking for something it is already expected to hold. The same rule lands on you the moment those testimonials appear on your own site, which is the part nobody mentions during the sale.

This is how the statute and the policies read; it is not legal advice, and a contract question is a question for a lawyer.

Score them on evidence you can verify without their help, then on fit.

Verifiable without asking: their own site's field performance against the published Web Vitals thresholds — an agency selling performance on a site that fails them has told you something; whether their own pages answer questions or describe themselves; and whether their client sites are still live, and still theirs.

Verifiable by asking, with documents: the nine questions above.

Fit, which is last and not first: do they work in your trade, do they price per quantity, will they say no to a page they think you do not need. An agency that agrees to everything in a sales call has not read the brief.

One disqualifier worth stating plainly. Any guarantee of a ranking position is either ignorance or a lie — nobody controls the ranking systems, and we do not make that promise either.