Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Design Agency in Canada

Note

Web design agency: a business that plans, designs and usually builds a website under contract, as a team rather than one person, and hands it over to run in your name.

If the "agency" turns out to be one person, most questions still apply; add one about who covers if they are unavailable. For product and app work, our guide to choosing a UX design agency has a version of this list written for that job.

Table · scrolls sideways

The sections below go further on the six that carry Canadian specifics.

Ask for every quote "plus HST" or "including HST", explicitly. Tax may sit outside the headline price; a mandatory setup or platform fee should not, and our guide to red flags in agency proposals explains why the Competition Bureau treats the two differently.

If the agency charges you HST, ask for its number and check it on the CRA's GST/HST registry, which lets you "confirm that the business charging you GST/HST is registered." That protects your input tax credits.

For reference, our own website prices are from $1,500, $3,500 or $7,500 CAD per project, plus HST, in two instalments: 50% to start, 50% at launch. Our pricing page shows what each tier includes.

Yours. Domain, hosting, analytics, Google Business Profile, email, and every font and plugin licence. For a .ca domain, the registrant should be your business, not the agency. Our guide to owning your website covers the account-by-account detail and why, under Canadian copyright law, the transfer of the code itself needs to be written down. Our own term is short: your code stays in your repository. You own it.

Ask for a WCAG level and how they check it: keyboard, screen reader, contrast. In Ontario, the AODA website rule covers designated public sector organizations and businesses and non-profits with 50 or more employees; our AODA guide sets out who it applies to and what it requires. Smaller businesses are not covered by that rule, but their customers still use keyboards, screen readers and small phones.

A contact form collects personal information. Ask which service receives submissions, where it stores them, and who can read them. If the agency or a tool it uses processes that data outside Canada, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says the organization that transferred it "is accountable for the information", and that people should be told their information may be processed in a foreign country. For clinics, our PHIPA forms guide explains what a first-contact form should never ask.

If you are replacing a site, ask for a redirect map. Google's site-move documentation says "It's important to map your old site's URLs to the URLs for the new site", with server-side permanent redirects. An agency that plans this before design starts is protecting the traffic you already have. Our redesign guide has the full checklist.

A ranking. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a number-one ranking on Google. Question 11 is there to get deliverables and acceptance criteria instead; the red flags guide shows what that looks like in a proposal.

In one email, to every agency on your shortlist, with your one-page brief attached. Written answers are comparable; recollections of a call are not. If an answer is vague, ask once more. If it is still vague, that is the answer. When the proposals arrive, our guide to red flags in agency proposals shows how to read them line by line.