What You Need to Consider When Choosing a Website Design Company
How to Choose a Website Design Company – When you are shopping for web designers, it can be hard to understand the differences between competing web design companies.
If you do a quick search online you will see ads offering websites for as low as $150. You will find web design companies who cater to specific niche’s like automotive, or doctors, or yoga studios.
You will also find pricing can be all over the place. We know web design companies who have a minimum fee of $12,000 and we know of niche website companies who charge a $500 set up fee and $250 per month.
If you submit your website design project to twenty companies for an estimate, you will probably get back twenty estimates that are all really different as far as price goes.
So with so much variance among web design companies, how do you choose a Website Design Company?
The rest of this article will help you make a good choice when choosing a web design agency that best fits your requirements and budget.
Choosing The Right Web Designer for You - Cost Versus Service
As with many types of services or products, you will most likely need to make a choice between how important the price is versus how important service is to you.
Low Cost – Low Service Web Design – there are a lot of niche website design companies that are incredibly inexpensive. Some specialize in healthcare and others in automotive and still others in fitness web design. You can often find these niche companies offering a website for a small set up fee and then a few hundred dollars per month.
And hey, we are not knocking these web design companies. If you are a start up business or a small business looking for ways to save money, these niche website builders are great.
They often have hundreds of templates to choose from and you simply give them the services you offer and some text about those services and they will build out a good looking website for you. That is a pretty good deal.
But – what we also find with these companies is that often their customers don’t care for the lack of service. We here complaints like, “I just asked them to add one photo and it took two days and the photo wasn’t relevant.”
This often happens because these low cost providers are outsourcing their service to web designers in countries where the exchange rate makes it cheap for them to hire labor. And again, we are no knocking that. For $500 down and $300 per month, they have to keep their costs low to make that business model work for them.
We are not even saying that they are offering “poor” or “bad” customer service. For a good website that is so inexpensive, you should expect to sacrifice any customization and have a slower response time and quality of service. You can’t expect to pay $300 per month and still get first class service. Nonetheless – many entrepreneurs get tired of this lack of service and start looking to level up from their current website build out.
High Cost – High Service Web Design
You might be surprised what people pay for websites. It is not uncommon for businesses to fork out over $100,000 for a business website. And this isn’t big businesses either – those companies have their own internal website teams.
We have seen businesses who have fifty employees and annual revenue below $5 million per year pay $200,000 for a website.
But, with those costs come high expectations. if you are spending over $20,000 for a website, it makes sense that you should expect next-level customer service. We would.
A word of caution – if you are going to spend big money on a website, do your homework. There are freelancers who are great at sales, and not good at fulfillment. We know companies who have spent over one hundred and fifty thousands dollars on their website and the designer was one person who simply disappeared.
In our opinion, unless your website is complicated with a lot of web development, you shouldn’t need to spend big money to get a great website.
Value Website Design
Most businesses should probably try to find a good value based web designer. These are companies who have been around awhile, are going to charge a mid-tier price and will have good service and still be around for years to come.
They offer web designs that have a very high end look, without the six figure price tag.
How do you find a good value based web design firm? Read reviews online. And when you engage with them, ask good questions.
Find out if they do their own designs or outsource their work overseas.
Look at how long they have been in business. If a web designer has been around at least five years, their is a good chance they will still be around in ten years.
Avoid freelancers
One thing about freelancers, they seem to change jobs a lot. They may be able to build you a nice website, but then when you want some updates or need something, sometimes you find out they “got a real job.” Sometimes they simply stop answering their old email and phone number. We suggest you stay away from freelancers.
Even if you are a start-up, a larger company who offers a small set up fee and then a monthly cost will probably offer better service long term than an individual freelancer.
Yes, there are good freelancers, but we simply feel that they are not “steady” enough for businesses who are serious about growth and success.
A freelancer may be great for a logo design or designing a brochure, but for websites, we suggest working with real businesses. There are plenty of them out there at all price points. You can certainly find one to work with who will still be around for years to come.
Get Clear About Scope of Work
If a web design company offers you a price without exploring exactly what you want, but careful.
One of the biggest problems between customers and web designers is not getting clear about the scope of work.
If you don’t do this up front, you may encounter problems later on. You may think you paid for what you want, and the web design agency may think you want way more than you paid for. This happens a lot more than you think.
The web design company has a fixed price, and you have an idea of how much work you want done. When these don’t match up, you find your web designer stops responding to your emails. Frustration sets in.
This happens because you think they owe you more work and they think you’ve already gotten more work than you paid for so they try avoid doing any more for you.
At Stay Wild Digital Marketing, we build our pricing based on the scope of work, which we coordinate with you to get clear on first.
Beware of any web design company who can give you a price without knowing exactly what you want done.
Would you trust a home builder who told you they could build you a “house” for $200,000 with no plan, no drawings, and no explanation? What kind of house do you think you might end up with?
Web design is no different. If you aren’t crystal clear about the scope of work, don’t be surprised when you can’t get the web design company to finish your website and stop responding to your emails.
Cost and Responsiveness
If you pay more, you should reasonably expect the web design company to respond quickly to your emails or phone calls.
Conversely, if you are paying a low cost provider, you shouldn’t expect rapid responses to your service requests.
The trouble starts when you pay someone a lot of money for a new website and they take a long time to respond to your requests for information. Ask your potential new web company how long you should expect to have to wait to hear from them once you email them?
Also – ask the fulfillment team this question. Insist on it. I wouldn’t trust a sales rep’s answer to this question. One, they probably don’t know the answer, and two, they are not incentivized to ask someone on the design side and tell you the true answer.
If responsiveness is important to you, ask this question. It might change your mind about who you use.
And again – freelancers… many of our current customers came to us because they used a freelancer, got their site built, and after that the freelancer took days or even weeks to respond to emails. And what do you expect? A one person operation has to do sales, close deals, prep for designing a website, gather all the images and text, have meetings, and service existing clients. Something is going to slip. Often it is responding to client emails about website updates.
Ask to See Samples of Their Work
This seems so simple, but it is important. If the company doesn’t have a portfolio on their website, ask to see samples of past work.
Look at what they send you? Is it awesome? Or is it simply adequate?
If it is adequate, and is a template, that is o.k. for a lot of businesses, but the cost should be low, like the low cost providers we mentioned earlier.
Too often we see samples of designers work that is expensive, and frankly isn’t that good.
Look at their samples and ask yourself: Would I be proud to show this work to a potential new client if this were my website?
Read Reviews Online
Again, this seems so simple, but reviews matter. They don’t need to have a million reviews, but they should have some. Read them.
PRO-TIP: Really read those reviews, especially on Google. There are companies out there who specialize in getting reviews, and sometimes they use fake reviewers. If the reviews are vague, or sound like an advertisement script, these may all be fake reviews. We find this to be especially true if a company has hundreds of reviews. You can figure that maybe 10% of all customers might leave a review, so how does a company with five employees have 300 five star reviews?
Summary - How to Choose a Website Design Company
How to Choose a Website Design Company – Choosing the right website design company goes beyond comparing prices—consider service quality, reliability, and fit for your business. Low-cost providers typically use standardized templates and outsource support, which helps keep fees down but limits customization and often leads to slow or impersonal service. These options suit startups and small businesses with limited budgets, but expect delays and little flexibility; upgrading may be necessary as your needs grow.
Premium agencies charge much more, sometimes tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands for a site, with higher expectations for support and features. However, pricey doesn’t always mean better. Some high-cost agencies underdeliver or even disappear mid-project, so research their reputation, longevity, and client reviews before committing. True value comes from established firms offering mid-tier pricing and balanced service, blending quality, attractive designs, and responsive support without breaking the bank.
Ask each company about their scope of work, project process, and how they handle revisions. Review portfolios to gauge design style and capability; if samples are lackluster, be cautious about premium rates. Demand transparency on response times and always read genuine customer reviews to see how well they resolve client issues and deliver on promises.
Avoid solo freelancers for long-term sites, as they may be hard to reach after launch or shift careers unexpectedly. Choose a stable, experienced company that communicates clearly, delivers consistently, and stays available for support and future updates—ensuring your website is an asset that grows with your business.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this article about how to choose a website design company. If you follow these guidelines, it should help you a great deal in navigating the complexity around web design agencies, their pricing, and what they do and do not offer.
About The Authors
Stay Wild Digital Marketing is headquartered in Salt Lake City with offices in Tampa Florida. Stay Wild Digital Marketing specializes in website design using WordPress, Wix, and Shopify. We offer custom websites, website refreshes, website hosting, and website re-design. Our prices are based on scope of work including number of pages, functionality, customization, and amount of design per page. Learn more on Youtube
