Most business owners we talk to have three quotes in front of them, all for "a website", all wildly different in price, and no way to tell what the difference actually is. The proposals use the same words. The cheapest one might be fine. It might also be a template with your logo dropped in.
Here is what to check. None of it requires technical knowledge, and all of it is answerable in a sentence.
1. Who owns the domain?
Ask to have the domain registered in your business name, with you as the registrant, and ask for the login. This sounds small. It is the single most common way businesses get trapped.
If the agency registers it under their own account, then changing agencies later means either negotiating for something you paid for or starting again at a new address and losing whatever search visibility you had built.
2. How fast is it on a phone, on mobile data?
Not on their office wifi, on a laptop. On a mid-range Android on 4G, which is how most of your customers will arrive.
Ask them to show you a competitor's site loading on a phone with wifi switched off. A site that takes eight seconds to appear has already lost a good share of the people who clicked.
3. Can you change the text yourself?
Sometimes yes is the right answer and sometimes no is. A twenty page site that gets updated weekly needs a content management system. A five page site that changes twice a year does not, and paying for one means paying for maintenance and security updates forever.
What matters is that they explain the trade-off rather than defaulting to whichever suits them.
4. What happens after launch?
"We hand it over" is a legitimate answer. So is a monthly care plan. What is not legitimate is silence, because things break: a plugin update, an expired certificate, a hosting invoice nobody paid.
Ask specifically: who renews the domain, who applies updates, who you call on a Sunday when the site is down.
5. Is there one page per thing people search for?
If you offer five services and all five sit as paragraphs on one page, that page will struggle to rank for any of them. Search engines match a page to a query, not a business to a query.
This is a structural decision made at the sitemap stage, and it is expensive to retrofit.
6. What does the site do when someone is interested?
There should be an obvious next step on every page, and it should be the one your customers actually use. In Sri Lanka that is usually WhatsApp, not a form.
A contact page that exists but is three clicks away is not a conversion path.
7. Will you see the work in stages?
A project where the first thing you see is the finished site is a project where you will have opinions too late to act on them. Ask for review points: the sitemap, the design direction, the first built page.
The uncomfortable one
If a quote is dramatically cheaper than the others, ask what is not included. Usually it is one of the seven above, and usually it is number one or number four. Neither shows up on launch day. Both show up about eight months later.
If you want to talk any of this through, including on a project we are not quoting for, message us. We would rather you ask good questions of whoever you hire.