Portfolios are curated. Every agency shows its three best projects, cropped and colour corrected, often years old and sometimes never launched. You can learn far more in ten minutes by measuring the live sites a company has actually shipped.
None of the checks below need any technical background. All of them are things a prospective client can run before the first meeting.
Check the site actually loads on a phone on mobile data
Turn off the wifi. Open three sites from the portfolio on your phone. Count the seconds. This one test quietly answers several questions at once: whether the company understands that most of its audience is on a phone, whether it thinks about image sizes, and whether it tested anywhere other than a fast office connection.
A heavy site is not a style choice. It is a decision somebody made to skip the boring part of the job.
Look at the address bar
Two things to notice. Does it say https with no warning? And is the address readable, something like a page name rather than a string of numbers and question marks? Readable addresses are a small sign that somebody thought about how the site would be found in search rather than only how it looked.
Read the page with the images turned off
Or more simply, select the text of the home page and read it on its own. Good work reads like a company explaining itself. Weak work reads like filler written to fill a layout, which usually means the copy was an afterthought and the site was designed around pictures rather than around what a customer wants to know.
Search for the client, not the agency
Type the client's business name into a search engine. Does their site come first? A beautiful site that cannot be found by its own name has a basic problem, and it is one the agency should have caught.
Check whether the site is still maintained
Look for a copyright year, a blog with recent entries, or a news page. A portfolio full of sites that stopped being updated the month after launch tells you what the relationship looks like after the invoice clears.
Try to use it badly
Submit the contact form with an empty field. Resize the browser window until it is narrow. Click the logo from an inner page. Use the keyboard tab key to move through a menu. These are the ordinary rough edges of real use, and they are exactly the places a rushed build shows through.
Ask who wrote it and who runs it now
Agencies subcontract. That is normal and not a problem in itself, but you should know whether the team that will build yours is the team that built the one you admired. Ask directly: who worked on this, are they still here, and will they be on my project.
What good looks like
Setting aside taste, the sites that hold up over years share the same unglamorous properties:
- They load quickly on a phone on mobile data
- They can be edited by the client without calling anybody
- They read clearly and say what the business does in the first screen
- They work with a keyboard and with a screen reader
- They are still being updated a year later
How we would like to be rated
Run every one of those checks on this site and on the ones in our work. We build on a boring, well maintained stack for exactly this reason: sites that are fast, that the owner can edit, and that still make sense to another developer years later.
If something we built fails one of these checks, we would genuinely like to know. And if you are choosing between agencies right now, send us the shortlist and we will tell you what we would look at.