Ask ten people what makes a good website and you will get ten answers. One says "clean design". Another says "easy to use". Someone mentions Google. All true, all vague.

We get briefs every week that describe a feeling ("modern", "premium", "not like our competitors") but never the job the site has to do. That gap is where budgets get wasted and projects drift.

So here is the checklist we wish more people used before they picked up the phone. Work through it and your brief will be sharper than most of the ones we see.

Start with the one job the site must do

A good website is not a brochure. It is a machine that does something specific.

Before anything else, finish this sentence: "This website is successful if a visitor ___."

Book a call. Request a quote. Buy a product. Download a guide. Fill in an enquiry form. Pick one primary action. You can have secondary ones, but only one gets to be the star.

If you cannot name the action, you are not ready to brief anyone. A site built to "look good" measures nothing, so it can never fail and can never improve.

Clarity beats cleverness

Most visitors decide in seconds whether they are in the right place. That means the top of your homepage has to answer three questions fast: what you do, who it is for, and what to do next.

We see gorgeous hero sections with a moody image and a slogan like "Reimagining tomorrow". Reimagining what? For whom? A joiner in Bridgend and a fintech startup should not have the same vague headline.

Good copy is specific. "Fitted kitchens for South Wales homes, installed in two weeks" tells you everything. "Crafting experiences" tells you nothing.

Speed is a feature, not a nice-to-have

A slow site loses people before they read a word. Phones on patchy mobile data are unforgiving, and Google factors loading performance into rankings.

You do not need to be an engineer to sense-check this. Open your current site on your phone, on 4G, away from the office WiFi. Count the seconds. If you are still waiting after three, that is a problem your visitors already know about.

When you brief an agency, ask how they build for speed: image handling, hosting, how much heavy third-party script they load. If the answer is a shrug, keep looking. Our own view on the engineering side lives on our engineering capabilities page.

Built for phones first

More than half of most sites' traffic is mobile. Yet plenty of designs are still drawn on a big monitor and squashed down afterwards.

Check the small things: are buttons big enough to tap with a thumb? Are forms short? Does the menu work one-handed? Can you read the text without pinching?

Ask to see mobile mockups early, not as an afterthought. If an agency only shows you the desktop version, they are designing for the wrong screen.

Findable, not just built

A beautiful site nobody can find is an expensive business card. Search visibility has to be baked in, not bolted on later.

At a minimum your site needs clean page titles, sensible URLs, proper heading structure, and pages that actually target what people search for. A single "Services" page rarely ranks; separate pages for each service usually do better.

This is worth understanding before you brief, because "SEO" gets thrown into quotes with wildly different meanings. We wrote about what SEO included should actually mean in what "SEO included" should mean in a website quote. Read it so you can ask better questions.

Trust signals in the right places

People buy from businesses they trust, and a website either builds that trust or quietly erodes it.

Real photos beat stock. Named reviews beat anonymous star ratings. A physical address and phone number reassure. Case studies with actual outcomes beat a wall of client logos.

Walk your current site as a suspicious first-time visitor. Would you hand this business your card details or your email? If you hesitate, so does everyone else.

Easy to update

A site that only your agency can change becomes stale, because "can you update this" turns into a small invoice every time.

Decide who will edit content and how often. If your team needs to add jobs, events, or blog posts, say so up front. The right content management approach depends on that answer, and it is much cheaper to plan for than to retrofit.

This does not mean you need the most complicated system going. It means the day-to-day changes you will actually make should take minutes, not a support ticket.

Accessible by default

Good accessibility is not a charity gesture. It is good design that happens to help everyone.

Decent colour contrast, text that scales, keyboard navigation, and alt text on images make a site usable for people with impairments and better for search engines too. In the UK there are also legal expectations for many organisations.

Ask your agency whether they build to recognised accessibility standards. A good one will say yes without flinching.

Measurable from day one

If you cannot see what people do on your site, you are flying blind. You will never know which page converts, which one leaks visitors, or whether that expensive redesign actually helped.

Analytics and conversion tracking should be part of the build, not a phase two. Tie them back to the one job you defined at the top. Track the action that matters, not vanity numbers like raw visits.

The pre-brief checklist

Before you contact an agency, write down answers to these:

• What is the one action a visitor should take?
• Who is the visitor, in plain words?
• What do you want to be found for on Google?
• Who will update the site, and how often?
• What does success look like in six months?
• What is your realistic budget range?

Bring those answers and you will get a sharper proposal, a more accurate price, and a site that does a job instead of just sitting there looking nice.

Where we come in

We build sites around the action they need to drive, then design and engineer everything else in service of it. If you want to see how we approach the design side, our websites service lays it out.

Get the checklist right first, though. A clear brief is worth more than any agency you hire, because it turns "make it modern" into a project everyone can actually deliver.