Seven things on an agency website that should make you walk away
We rebuilt our own site and found most of these on it. Here is what to check before you sign with anyone — including us.
We recently rebuilt this website from scratch. Auditing the old one was uncomfortable, because it had accumulated most of the problems below — not through dishonesty, but through the slow drift that happens when a template gets filled in and never revisited.
So here is the checklist, written from the inside. It applies to us as much as anyone.
1. The years in business do not match across pages
Our old site said nine years on the homepage, twelve on the about page, and seven-plus on all three service pages. Nobody wrote those numbers to deceive. They were written at different times by different people, and no one held the whole site in their head at once.
But a prospect who notices it cannot tell the difference between sloppiness and dishonesty — and they should not have to. If a company cannot keep one fact consistent across five pages, what happens to your project scope?
Check: Open three pages and compare any number that appears on more than one.
2. Client logos the company cannot possibly have
Our old theme shipped with Amazon and Netflix logos in the client strip, and they were still live years later. This is depressingly common; template demo assets have a way of surviving into production.
Check: Pick the most impressive logo on the page and search for a case study, testimonial or press mention naming that client. If the logo is real, the proof is usually one click away.
3. Awards you cannot find anywhere else
“Innovation Partner of the Year.” “Emerging Technology Leader.” Impressive-sounding awards from bodies with no website, no past winners list and no ceremony anyone attended.
Check: Search the award name in quotes. A real award has other winners.
4. Headcount that contradicts the team page
A company claiming 350 creative professionals while its careers page lists five people is telling you something, just not what it intended.
Check: Compare the headline number with the number of named humans anywhere on the site.
5. The same sentence in three places
Our old service pages each carried the line “We craft a unique brand story that sets you apart from the competition” — under three different headings, on three different pages. Our vision statement and mission statement were word-for-word identical.
This is what happens when a template’s placeholder copy never gets replaced. It is a reliable signal that nobody has actually read the site end to end.
Check: Copy a generic-sounding sentence and search the site for it.
6. Testimonials with no company attached
A first name and a glowing sentence proves nothing. A name, a role, a company and ideally a logo means somebody agreed to attach their professional reputation to the claim.
Check: Can you find the person on LinkedIn at the company named?
7. A portfolio with no numbers
“We delivered a beautiful website for a leading brand” tells you nothing. Real case studies carry constraints and outcomes: what the deadline was, what broke, what the result measured.
Check: Count the specific numbers in the portfolio. Zero is a bad sign.
What we did about our own list
We removed the awards. We removed the borrowed logos. We removed the headcount claims. We fixed the founding year in one config file so it can never disagree with itself again, and we cut the portfolio down to the work we can genuinely evidence.
The site got smaller. It also got considerably easier to defend in a meeting — which, it turns out, is what a website is for.