How to Choose a Web Development Agency: A 9-Point Checklist Before You Pay the Deposit

The fastest way to work out how to choose a web development agency: ask for three things before anyone talks price. Links to two sites they built that are still live today. The name of the person you call when the site goes down on a Saturday night. And one page listing what is included. A serious vendor sends all three within a day.

Price is a poor filter this early. A Rp2 million quote and a Rp20 million quote can both be reasonable, depending on what is inside: who writes the copy, who prepares the photographs, and who looks after it for the next year. The gap between two quotes is almost always in those three things.

How to Choose a Web Development Agency: 9 Points to Check

The order starts with what you can verify yourself in ten minutes, with no technical knowledge.

1. A portfolio that is still alive. Open two or three of their sites on your own phone. If any are dead or break on a small screen, ask why.
2. A client you can actually call. One phone number of a past client beats ten testimonial screenshots.
3. Domain and hosting registered to your company, not to the vendor.
4. Full admin access from day one, not after the final payment.
5. A written breakdown: how many pages, who writes the copy, who prepares the photos, how many rounds of revision.
6. The speed of the sites they build. Run one of their portfolio sites through PageSpeed Insights — free, one minute. A mobile score under 50 is a yellow light.
7. The warranty period, and exactly what it covers.
8. How they answer a question they do not know. "Let me check" is more trustworthy than an instant answer to everything.
9. A contract, however small the project. One page is enough — what matters is that it exists.

Point three causes the most disputes. Have the domain registered in your company name, then keep the registrar email and password yourself. We spell this out on our website service page because we meet too many prospects who cannot change vendors for the single reason that they do not own their own domain.

What Has to Be in the Quote

A paragraph on WhatsApp is not a quote. One page is plenty, but it has to carry these six things:

• The list of pages, named one by one.
• Who writes the copy and who supplies the product photography.
• How many revisions, and until when.
• A handover date, not "about a month".
• Year-two costs: domain, hosting, maintenance.
• What happens to your site if the relationship ends.

That last point is the one most often forgotten. A simple company website usually costs Rp800 thousand to Rp2.5 million a year in domain and hosting alone, before maintenance. Small numbers — but they belong in the quote from the start, so they do not feel like a surprise invoice in month 13. That kind of breakdown is what you compare across any package and price list, ours included.

Five Warning Signs

From conversations with prospects who have been burned before, the pattern repeats.

• A price is quoted before the vendor knows what your business sells.
• Every question is answered "yes, we can". Nothing is ever answered "that is out of scope".
• The portfolio is images rather than links you can open.
• Full payment up front on a project over Rp5 million.
• They will not say who is actually doing the work.

There is a sixth sign, subtler, and you only feel it later: the vendor who never asks anything about your customers. If the first hour is spent on colours and animation without once asking who is going to read the site, the result will look good and sit empty.

Three Questions That Make Vendors Honest

"If I add one page mid-project, what does it cost and how long does it take?"

A good answer has a number in it, even a rough one. "Free, no problem" is the worrying one — that addition will be taken out of the time budgeted for something else.

"Who do I call if the site goes down on a Sunday?"

You do not need a 24-hour service promise. You need one name and one number. An honest small team will say "me, usually within a few hours", and that is an answer you can hold them to.

"Can you tell me about a project that failed or ran badly late?"

This one reveals the most. Every vendor has had a project drag. The ones who can explain why without blaming the client have usually learned something. The ones who have never failed have probably not built much.

In our experience, companies in Sidoarjo and Surabaya more often pick wrong not because they were cheated, but because they bought too much at the start. One heavy-equipment workshop arrived holding a quote for 40 bilingual pages, when what their customers wanted was three things: the address, a WhatsApp number, and a list of services. The five-page version that actually shipped took two weeks.

Going cheapest has a price too. The lowest-rate vendor usually covers the gap by running many projects at once, and you feel it the first time you need a fast revision. So what you are comparing is not the number — it is what has been left out of the number.

If you are holding two or three quotes right now and cannot tell which is reasonable, take all of them to somebody with no interest in selling you a site — your internal IT staff, a colleague who has built one before, or a free consultation with our team. Half an hour reading the line items is usually enough to see which one was written seriously.