Every web design agency in Toronto says it is creative, results-driven, passionate about its clients and different from the others. Reading thirteen of their websites in one sitting is an education in how little marketing copy distinguishes one from another — the same six adjectives, the same stock photograph of a team pointing at a monitor, the same promise to understand your business.
None of that is useful for choosing. What follows is.
Start with the portfolio, and open it
An agency’s portfolio is the only part of its site that cannot be written. Open the actual websites, not the screenshots.
On a phone, on your own data connection, check three things. Does it load before you get bored. Does the phone number dial when you tap it. Does the enquiry form submit and produce an acknowledgement. A surprising number of portfolio pieces fail at least one, and a broken form on an agency’s own showcase tells you what the handover was like.
Screenshots are a warning sign in themselves. An agency showing images rather than links is either showing work that no longer exists, work it did not do alone, or work the client has since replaced.
The ownership question
Ask, in writing: at the end of this project, whose name is on the domain, the hosting account and the source files.
The correct answer is yours, all three. Some agencies register the domain in their own name, host the site on an account you cannot access, and describe this as being taken care of. That is a lock, and it becomes visible on the day you want to leave — usually as an unexpected fee, a delay, or a site that quietly stops working.
This is worth asking even when the price is attractive. Especially then.
What “revisions” means at this agency
Revision terms are where cheap projects go wrong. Ask how many rounds are included, at which stage, and what happens after they run out.
An agency offering revisions without any limit is not being generous, it is deferring an argument. Somewhere in the process there is a point where changes start costing money, and an agency that will not name that point in advance will name it during the project. A stated number — two rounds at design, one after build, for instance — is a commitment that can be checked.
The related question is what counts as a revision rather than a new request. A colour change is a revision. A new page is not.
Is measurement part of the build
Ask whether Google Analytics and Search Console will be set up, verified and handed over as part of the project, or quoted separately afterwards.
A website that cannot report how many enquiries it produced and where they came from is not a business asset, it is decoration. This is inexpensive work — an hour or two — and an agency that leaves it out is either unaware of why it matters or planning to charge for it later. Both answers are informative.
The timeline question, asked properly
Every agency will give a timeline. The useful version of the question is: what will delay this, and whose fault will it be.
The honest answer, at every agency in this market, is content. Projects slip because photographs, text, product data and feedback arrive late from the client side, not because developers are slow. An agency that says so upfront, and tells you exactly what it needs from you and when, is describing a process it has actually run. An agency that promises a date without mentioning your side of it is selling you a timeline it cannot control.
What happens after launch
Three specific questions:
- Who fixes it if something breaks in the first month, and is that included?
- What does ongoing maintenance cost, and what exactly is inside it?
- Can we edit the content ourselves, and will somebody show us how?
Maintenance pricing in Toronto runs from about C$69 a month at the budget end to several hundred at the mid-market, and what is inside it varies enormously. “Small changes” is a phrase that appears on most agency maintenance pages and is defined on almost none of them. Ask for hours.
Warning signs that reliably precede a bad project
Guaranteed first-page rankings. Search results are not sold, ranking factors are not published in full, and no agency controls the outcome. An agency promising a position is either misunderstanding its own product or misrepresenting it.
No price indication anywhere, at any stage. A refusal to discuss ranges before a lengthy discovery call is a sales process, not a scoping requirement. Every agency knows roughly what its projects cost.
Client counts and percentages with no source. “500 businesses served”, “increased conversions by 250%” — attractive numbers that nobody can check, attached to projects nobody can name. Ask which client, and what the analytics access was.
Awards nobody can name. An agency describing itself as winning awards, without naming one and giving the year, is using a phrase rather than a credential.
A proposal you cannot read in fifteen minutes. Forty pages of process diagrams usually means the process is the product.
Questions worth asking that agencies do not expect
- How many hours of this estimate are design and development, and how many are project management and meetings?
- Which platform would you recommend if you earned nothing from the recommendation?
- What is the most common reason your projects go over budget?
- Who specifically will be building this, and will they still be on it in week six?
- What do you not do? Which projects do you turn down?
The last one is the most revealing. An agency that takes everything is either large enough to mean it or unfocused enough to be dangerous, and the answer tells you which.
The honest summary
Price sorts the Toronto market into four bands, and the band matters less than the fit inside it. A C$1,599 template package is a real product that suits some businesses. A C$40,000 brand-led build is a real product that suits others. The failures happen when a business buys from the wrong band — usually a small local company sold a process-heavy engagement it did not need, or a growing company sold a theme it outgrew in a year.
Work out which product you are buying first. Then ask the five questions above, and choose the agency whose answers are specific.