Web Design RFP: What Agencies Won’t Tell You Before You Send It

A web design RFP is a formal document that invites agencies or developers to bid on a website project by outlining your requirements, timeline, budget, and evaluation criteria. Done well, it filters out poor-fit vendors, sharpens your own thinking, and creates the conditions for a fair, comparable selection process. Done badly, it wastes everyone’s time and sets the project up to fail before a single wireframe is drawn.

Most RFP guides focus on what to include. This one focuses on what actually determines whether the process works, including the parts that agencies will rarely say out loud when they’re trying to win your business.

Before getting into the mechanics, it’s worth grounding this in the broader context of what a website project is actually trying to achieve. If you’re thinking through web design strategy more broadly, the Web Design & Development hub covers the full landscape, from platform decisions to UX principles to post-launch performance.

Why Most Web Design RFPs Fail Before They’re Sent

I’ve been on both sides of the RFP table. As an agency CEO, I responded to dozens of them. As a client-side operator and consultant, I’ve written and overseen them. The pattern that kills most RFP processes is the same: the brief asks for a solution before the problem is properly defined.

You’ll see RFPs that specify the number of pages, the CMS platform, the colour palette, and the launch date, but say almost nothing about why the current site isn’t working, who the target audience is, or what commercial outcomes the new site needs to drive. Agencies fill that gap with assumptions, and then you end up evaluating five proposals that are solving five different problems.

The fix is straightforward: treat the RFP as a strategic document first, and a procurement document second. The agencies worth working with will respond to that kind of brief with far more useful thinking than they’ll produce in response to a feature checklist.

What to Include in a Web Design RFP

There’s no single correct format, but a well-structured RFP covers the following areas. Each section has a specific job to do.

Company and Context

Give agencies enough background to understand your business model, your market position, and your competitive context. This isn’t a company history exercise. It’s about giving respondents the information they need to make relevant recommendations rather than generic ones. Include your industry, your primary revenue model, your key customer segments, and any constraints that will shape the project (regulatory requirements, brand guidelines, existing tech stack).

The Problem You’re Trying to Solve

This is the section most RFPs get wrong. “We need a new website” is not a problem statement. “Our current site generates a 3.2% conversion rate on demo requests, our bounce rate on the pricing page is 78%, and we’re losing ground to competitors whose sites load in under two seconds” is a problem statement. Be specific about what isn’t working and, where possible, include the data that tells you it isn’t working.

If you haven’t done this diagnostic work yet, it’s worth commissioning a proper audit before issuing the RFP. Understanding the cost of a UX audit upfront can save you from spending ten times that amount fixing a site that was built on the wrong assumptions.

Objectives and Success Metrics

What does success look like twelve months after launch? Be concrete. If you can’t name the metrics you’ll use to evaluate whether the project worked, you’re not ready to issue an RFP. Agencies that ask about this in their response are the ones worth talking to. Agencies that don’t ask are planning to measure success by whether you paid the final invoice.

Scope and Functional Requirements

List what you know you need: page count (approximate), integrations, accessibility standards, multilingual requirements, e-commerce functionality, user account systems, and so on. Be honest about what you’re uncertain about. A good agency will help you scope the unknowns. A bad one will price them out of the project and then charge you for them later.

If your site relies on users finding content through search, make sure your RFP includes requirements around internal site search optimisation. It’s consistently underspecified in web briefs and consistently underdelivered as a result.

Technical Requirements

CMS platform preferences (or requirements), hosting environment, performance benchmarks, security standards, analytics setup, and any existing integrations that need to be maintained. If you’re evaluating platforms as part of the project, say so. The Webflow vs WordPress question, for example, has real commercial and operational implications that a good agency should be able to advise on rather than default to whatever they build most of.

Budget Range

Include it. I know the instinct is to withhold it, and I understand the logic: you don’t want to anchor agencies at your ceiling. But that logic doesn’t hold up in practice. When you don’t share a budget, agencies either guess conservatively and under-scope the work, or guess aggressively and price you out of the process. Either way, you end up comparing proposals that aren’t comparable.

There’s a principle I’ve carried for years from agency leadership: it’s no achievement to sell a project at half the price it should cost. Agencies that do it aren’t giving you a deal. They’re cutting scope, cutting resource, or cutting corners. Usually all three. The client finds out six months into a project that’s running over time, over budget, and under-delivering. Sharing your budget range doesn’t make you vulnerable. It makes the process honest.

Timeline

Include your target launch date and any hard deadlines (product launches, seasonal windows, board commitments). But also be realistic. The agencies who tell you what you want to hear about timeline are not the agencies who will deliver on it.

Evaluation Criteria

Tell agencies how you’ll make your decision. Weighting by cost, strategic thinking, relevant experience, team capability, and process transparency is a reasonable framework. Publishing the criteria in the RFP itself raises the quality of responses and signals that you’re running a serious process.

How to Evaluate Agency Responses

Most pitch evaluations overweight presentation skills and underweight process rigour. An agency that gives a polished deck doesn’t necessarily build good websites. An agency that asks uncomfortable questions about your brief and pushes back on your assumptions probably does.

When I was running agency pitches, the questions we asked clients told us more about whether we could actually help them than any amount of chemistry or case study work. The same principle applies in reverse. The questions an agency asks you during the RFP process are one of your best signals of how they work.

consider this to look for in a strong proposal:

• Evidence they read your brief: Generic proposals that could have been written for any client are a red flag. Strong proposals reference your specific problem, your market context, and your stated objectives.
• A clear process with defined deliverables: Not just “discovery, design, build, launch” but specifics. What does discovery involve? Who attends? What do you get at the end of it? What are the review gates?
• Honest scope definition: The best proposals include explicit statements about what is and isn’t included. Vague scope is how projects go over budget.
• Post-launch thinking: A website isn’t a one-time deliverable. Who maintains it? How are performance issues identified and addressed? What does the handover look like?
• Relevant experience, not just impressive logos: An agency that built a complex B2B SaaS site is more relevant to your brief than one that built a beautiful consumer brand site, regardless of which looks better in a credentials deck.

If you’re evaluating a B2B software website specifically, it’s worth having a structured framework for assessing what good looks like before you brief agencies. The B2B software company website analysis criteria gives you a useful baseline for that kind of evaluation.

The Questions Your RFP Should Be Asking About Post-Launch Capability

Most RFPs are entirely focused on the build. Very few ask serious questions about what happens after launch. This is where a lot of web projects quietly fail.

A new website is a starting point, not a finished product. The sites that perform well over time are the ones where someone is actively monitoring user behaviour, running tests, and iterating based on data. That requires either an in-house capability or an ongoing agency relationship that’s scoped and budgeted for.

If you’re building a site that needs to convert, ask agencies specifically about their approach to post-launch optimisation. Ask about their experience with conversion rate work, with user testing, and with tools like Hotjar for understanding how users actually behave on a site versus how you think they do. The gap between those two things is almost always larger than clients expect.

Also ask about AI and automation capability. If your site handles significant traffic or has complex conversion pathways, the question of whether and how to use AI chatbots for website conversion optimisation is worth addressing in the RFP rather than discovering mid-project that your chosen agency has no experience with it.

The Migration Question Most RFPs Ignore

If you have an existing site with any meaningful organic search traffic, your RFP must include explicit requirements around migration planning. I’ve seen well-funded website projects lose 40% or more of their organic traffic within weeks of launch because nobody properly planned the redirect structure or preserved the URL architecture.

This isn’t a technical edge case. It’s one of the most common and most avoidable ways that web projects destroy commercial value. Ask every agency on your shortlist how they approach site migrations. Ask to see examples. Ask specifically about how they handle redirect mapping, canonical tags, and crawl budget during a migration. If they can’t answer those questions fluently, they shouldn’t be building a site that depends on organic search.

A detailed website migration checklist is worth working through before you brief any agency, so you know exactly what to require of them and can evaluate their responses with some baseline knowledge.

How Many Agencies Should You Invite?

Three to five is the right number for most projects. Fewer than three and you’re not generating enough competitive tension or comparative perspective. More than five and you’re wasting your time and the agencies’ time, and the quality of your evaluation will drop because you’re processing too much information.

Do a qualification stage before you issue the full RFP. A short questionnaire or a fifteen-minute call to assess basic fit, relevant experience, and capacity is worth doing. It protects your shortlist from agencies who’ll submit a proposal but couldn’t actually resource the project if they won it.

One more thing on this: be respectful of agencies’ time. A full RFP response takes a good agency ten to twenty hours of senior time to produce properly. If you’re not seriously considering them, don’t invite them. The industry has a habit of running speculative pitch processes with six or seven agencies as a way of generating free strategic thinking. It’s not a good look, and it means the agencies you actually want to work with will start declining your invitations.

Red Flags in Agency Proposals

There are patterns in agency proposals that consistently predict project problems. These aren’t absolute disqualifiers, but they’re worth taking seriously.

• No discovery phase or a very short one: Any agency that wants to go straight from brief to design hasn’t understood that the brief is never complete. Discovery exists to surface the things you don’t know you don’t know.
• Vague deliverables: If a proposal says “design concepts” without specifying how many, at what fidelity, with what review process, it’s not a proposal. It’s a holding document.
• All creative, no commercial: Beautiful work that doesn’t connect to your business objectives is expensive decoration. Ask how they measure whether the design decisions they’re making will actually improve performance.
• Overpromising on timeline: If every other agency is quoting sixteen weeks and one is quoting six, the six-week agency is either planning to cut corners or hasn’t properly scoped the work.
• No questions during the process: An agency that submits a proposal without asking a single clarifying question either didn’t read your brief carefully or is telling you what you want to hear rather than what you need to know.

I was reminded of this last point during a particularly stressful period running an agency. We were deep into a major campaign for a large telecoms client, and a critical issue emerged at the eleventh hour that required us to scrap months of work and start again under severe time pressure. The agencies that handle that kind of pressure well are the ones who asked the difficult questions at the start of the process, not the ones who nodded along and promised everything. The same principle applies to web projects. The agency that challenges your brief is usually the agency that saves you from yourself.

The Conversation After the RFP

The RFP is the beginning of the selection process, not the end. Once you’ve reviewed written proposals and shortlisted two or three agencies, the next stage is a structured conversation, not a presentation.

Ask them to walk you through how they’d approach your specific problem, not a generic version of it. Ask about the team that would actually work on your project, not just the senior people who appear in the pitch. Ask about their current capacity and what else they’re working on. Ask what they’d do differently if they were running this project versus what you’ve specified.

The answers to those questions will tell you more about fit than any credentials deck. Chemistry matters, but it’s not a substitute for process clarity, commercial transparency, and genuine capability in the areas your project requires.

There’s a lot more to web design strategy than the procurement process. If you’re thinking about the broader decisions around platform, performance, and user experience, the Web Design & Development section of The Marketing Juice covers those questions in depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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