How to Verify a Web Agency Portfolio: Five Checks You Can Run Yourself

How to verify a web agency portfolio comes down to one instruction: stop looking at the screenshots and open the addresses. A screenshot can be five years old, it can be a design that never shipped, and it can be somebody else's work. A site that is live on its own domain cannot be invented. The five checks below are free, need no account, and take about twenty minutes for three projects.

Every tool named here was opened and exercised again on 19 October 2026. The point is not to catch an agency out. Most agencies are honest about what they built. The point is to make the story on the portfolio page match the story the internet tells.

Pick three projects, not forty

A portfolio wall of forty client logos looks convincing. Checking forty of them takes two days, and nobody does it.

Take three. The one closest to what you need, the most recent one, and the oldest one. The first tells you whether they have done your kind of work. The second tells you what their current output looks like. The third tells you whether their work survives after they walk away.

Ask for addresses rather than images. An agency that will not name a single live URL has already answered the question for you.

How to verify a web agency portfolio: five checks in order

They run cheapest first. If check one fails on all three samples, you can stop there.

1. Open the address. Does the site still load, or has it turned into a parking page offering the domain for sale? One dead project means little — clients close, budgets end. Three out of three is a pattern.
2. Look up the domain age at pandi.id/whois. PANDI is the registry for Indonesian .id names. Type the domain into the search box and press Cari. For a .id or .co.id name the result shows Dibuat (created), Terakhir Diperbarui (last updated), Tanggal Kadaluarsa (expiry) and a Sponsor Registrar block naming the company that registered it. A name that was never registered comes back as Tidak Terdaftar.
3. Read the site's history on web.archive.org. Paste the address into the Wayback Machine and you get a calendar of the years it was captured. This answers the question people skip: is the design in the portfolio still the one on the live site, or did somebody else replace it two years ago?
4. View the page source. Right-click the page, choose View Page Source, then search for the word generator. Many sites announce their own platform on that line — when we tested it on 19 October 2026, a reference site returned a meta tag naming WordPress and its version number. This is not a verdict on any platform. It is a check on whether the price story matches the method.
5. Measure it on a phone at pagespeed.web.dev. Enter the address, choose Mobile, and read the LCP figure: how many seconds until the largest piece of the page appears. Google's own documentation puts a good value at 2.5 seconds or less.

None of those five asks for a paid account or a technical background.

Two things no tool can tell you

First, who actually did the work. A polished site can be the output of one designer who resigned six months ago. The question is simple and almost nobody asks it: who was on that project team, and are those people still here?

Second, how the project ran. A finished site keeps no record of revision loops that went nowhere, a deadline that slipped by three months, or two weeks of unanswered messages.

For the second there is exactly one method, and it is not comfortable: ask for one client contact you may phone. Not a written testimonial — testimonials are written by the agency. One phone number and a five-minute conversation.

While you wait for that, compare the scope of the quotes rather than their feature lists. A published breakdown such as our website package page works as a neutral yardstick: it shows what normally sits inside the price and what tends to be billed separately.

A thin portfolio is not the real problem

This is our opinion and not everyone shares it. Three projects is not a reason to walk away. A team two years old has three. If all three are live, load quickly, and are still in use by the client, that is stronger evidence than forty logos with half the domains dead.

The three things genuinely worth avoiding all show up in the five checks above.

• A portfolio with no addresses. Screenshots only, no clickable links, and no client that may be named.
• A project nobody can explain. The agency cannot recall which parts they built, or the answer changes when you ask again a week later.
• Five projects that look identical. Same page structure, same typography, same menu order across every example. That is usually one ready-made theme reinstalled. Fine in itself, as long as the price is not a build-from-scratch price.

And one honest caveat: these checks can be unfair. Good agencies also have dead projects, because clients shut down, move to someone else, or forget to renew a domain. What matters is not the body count. What matters is whether the agency can account for each project without getting defensive.

In our experience the agencies most relaxed about discussing a project that went badly are the safest ones to hire.

Questions that usually come next

Once your shortlist is down to two or three names and you want a second opinion before signing, send us the three addresses. Reading them with a prospective client is something we do routinely through jasa pembuatan website Surabaya or konsultan IT Sidoarjo, at no cost and with no obligation to continue.