Define what needs to improve.
A dated appearance, confusing navigation and difficult content updates are different problems. Identify the important customer tasks so each supplier is responding to the same brief.
- Which services, products or information must be easy to find?
- What should a visitor do next: inquire, book, buy or sign in?
- Which parts of the current site are useful enough to retain?
- Who needs to edit the content and manage the site?
Compare deliverables, not feature-list length.
Pages and design
Check the page inventory, mobile layouts, review stages and number of agreed revision rounds.
Content and assets
Identify who writes, supplies and approves copy, images and product information. Clarify any translation work separately.
Customer journeys
Describe the form, booking, shopping or portal actions being built, including what your team receives.
Integrations
Name the systems, data and workflows being connected, plus the testing and access each requires.
Ongoing costs
Compare hosting, licences, maintenance and additional work alongside the initial build cost.
Protect what already works.
Inventory useful content and important existing URLs before changing the structure. Keep URLs where practical; plan a relevant replacement when they change.
- List important pages, search landing pages and existing content.
- Map changed URLs to the relevant new pages with permanent redirects.
- Update internal links, canonical URLs and the sitemap as needed.
- Assign responsibility for pre-launch checks and post-launch monitoring.
Agree the acceptance checks.
Ask each supplier how the following will be reviewed on staging. Confirm who records issues and approves the final release.
- Mobile and desktop navigation and readable content.
- The important inquiry, booking or shopping journeys.
- Forms, notifications and integrations using a controlled test plan.
- Editing access and the tasks your team needs to perform.
- Redirects, metadata, crawl controls and important internal links.
- Backups, deployment verification and the rollback route.
Make handover and support explicit.
- Who controls domain, hosting and administrator access?
- What editing guidance and documentation will be provided?
- Which updates, fixes and content changes does maintenance cover?
- What response arrangements and exclusions apply?
- How will the site, content and agreed records be handed over later?
Your next step: mark each proposal against the same checklist, then ask suppliers to explain any gaps. Compare the complete scope and dependencies before choosing a price or launch date.