How To Write A Website Design RFP (Request For Proposal): Template and Example

A website design RFP helps you attract the right agencies and get useful, comparable proposals. Many RFPs fall short—they are either too vague, leading to generic responses, or too strict, which limits creative input from agencies. A good RFP clearly explains your business, goals, requirements, and constraints so qualified agencies can suggest relevant solutions and share their expertise. This guide explains what to include, how to organize your RFP, and what a strong final version looks like.

Before starting the RFP process, it helps to define what a website design RFP is and when creating one will add real value to your project.

A Request for Proposal is a formal way to invite vendors to submit proposals for a specific project. For website design, an RFP explains your organization, your current website, your goals for the new site, technical needs, timeline, and how you will evaluate proposals. This lets agencies respond with detailed, tailored proposals instead of generic overviews.

Not all website projects need a formal RFP. For smaller projects, it’s often quicker and just as effective to talk to one or two agencies and share a written outline of your needs. An RFP is most helpful when your project is large, you need competitive bids, the technical or strategic needs are complex, or several departments have requirements to include.

“The RFP process works best when it’s treated as a conversation starter rather than a final specification. You want agencies to respond with their expertise and their approach, not just confirm that they can check boxes on your requirements list. The best RFPs give enough context that an agency can tell you something useful you hadn’t thought of. The worst ones are so prescriptive they filter out the agencies most likely to improve on your thinking.” – Strategy Team, Emulent Marketing.

Once you understand when an RFP is appropriate, the next step is preparing what comes before writing. Setting a strong foundation is essential for successful proposals.

The quality of the proposals you receive depends on how clear your early planning is. If you write an RFP before your team agrees on goals, budget, and success measures, you’ll get proposals that are inconsistent and hard to compare. Doing the groundwork before writing the RFP takes time but helps you avoid picking a vendor based on the wrong information and running into problems later.

Here’s the internal work to finish before you write your RFP:

• Define the problem the website needs to solve. Before specifying what the website should look like or include, align your team on what the current website isn’t doing well and what a new one needs to accomplish. Specific problems produce specific goals. “We need a new website” is not a goal. “Our current website generates 12 qualified leads per month, and we need 40” is a goal that agencies can build toward and measure against.
• Set a realistic budget range. Sharing your budget helps agencies give you more useful proposals and lets them tell you if your goals match your investment. Giving a range allows for flexibility but keeps proposals grounded in what you can actually spend. Without a budget, agencies might suggest a wide range of options that are hard to compare.
• Identify all internal stakeholders and their needs. Website projects often involve teams like marketing, IT, sales, legal, and executives. Each group may have requirements that affect the project’s scope, technology, or content. Collect everyone’s input early to avoid changes later that could disrupt your budget and timeline.
• Review your current website’s performance and issues. Gather analytics data, check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console, and note the specific performance gaps you want to fix with the new site. Sharing this data gives agencies a clear starting point and shows that your decisions are based on facts, not just looks.s.
• Decide which choices are already made and which you want agencies to help with. Some things may be set, like using WordPress as your CMS, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, or keeping your current hosting provider. Other areas, like visual design, site structure, and content strategy, might be open for agency input. Being clear about what’s fixed and what’s flexible helps agencies focus their proposals and offer useful ideas.

Once you’ve done the prep work, think about how to organize your RFP. Clear, well-structured sections make it easier for agencies to respond with useful proposals.

A comprehensive website design RFP provides agencies with the context they need to propose accurately and the criteria they need to respond strategically. The sections below represent a complete structure that works for most mid-to-large website projects. Smaller projects can use a condensed version of this structure while keeping the same core elements: who you are, what you need, what you technically require, your timeline, and how you’ll decide.

The core sections of a complete website design RFP:

• Organization overview: Briefly describe your organization, what it does, who it serves, size, market position, and the website’s context. Be concise but substantive so agencies unfamiliar with you understand your category, audience, and competitive environment. Include your main business goals and how the website connects to them.
• Project background and goals: Explain why you’re updating the website now. What triggered the project—rebranding, a business shift, poor metrics, outdated tech, or a strategy shift? List the main goals in order of priority. Make goals measurable: “increase organic search traffic by 40% within 12 months” is better than “improve SEO.”
• Current website assessment: Describe your website, including URL, CMS, approximate page count, and current performance metrics, as well as the specific problems you are addressing. If analytics data reveals gaps, summarize it here. This context helps agencies determine scope and whether the project is a rebuild or a redesign.
• Target audience: Describe your website’s main and secondary audiences. Include demographics, behaviors, and each segment’s site goals. Share any research or data on current engagement. Agencies that understand your users can better tailor design and content.
• Functional and technical requirements: List the specific technical requirements the new website must meet. This section should cover CMS requirements, hosting environment, third-party integrations, accessibility standards, performance benchmarks, browser and device support, security requirements, and any compliance obligations relevant to your industry. Be specific: “must integrate with Salesforce via API” is a requirement. “Should work with our CRM” is not.
• Design and brand requirements: Describe any brand constraints that govern the visual design. Include whether you have existing brand guidelines, whether the agency is expected to follow them strictly or refresh them as part of the project, and any design directions or examples you want to share. If you have specific visual preferences or strong preferences against certain directions, state them directly to prevent proposals that spend significant effort in a direction you would reject.
• Content strategy and migration requirements: Clarify who is responsible for writing new content, whether the agency, your internal team, or a combination. Describe the approximate number of pages on the current site, how many will carry over to the new site, and whether content migration is part of the project scope. Content responsibilities are among the most common sources of budget and timeline disputes in website projects, and explicitly addressing them in the RFP prevents misalignment from arising after the contract is signed.
• SEO requirements: Specify that the project must include SEO best practices baked into the build, including proper page hierarchy, clean URL structures, control over meta tags, support for schema markup, Core Web Vitals optimization, and a redirect strategy for all changed URLs. If your current site has existing organic search rankings that need to be protected during the transition, state that explicitly and ask agencies to describe their approach to preserving traffic during the site launch.
• Project timeline: Provide your target launch date or the date range within which launch must occur, along with any fixed milestones the timeline must accommodate, such as a product launch, an event, a fiscal year start, or a board presentation. Ask agencies to propose a project schedule within those constraints and to flag any timeline risks they identify based on the scope described.
• Budget range: Include your project budget range. If internal policy prevents you from disclosing a budget, at a minimum, include a range broad enough that agencies can determine whether the engagement is viable for them to pursue and whether your budget is realistic for the scope you’ve described.
• Proposal requirements and evaluation criteria: Tell agencies exactly what you want them to submit, including the format, page or length limits, the specific questions you want answered, and the date and method of submission. List your evaluation criteria and their relative weights so that agencies can see what you value most and structure their proposals accordingly. Common criteria include relevant experience and portfolio, proposed approach and methodology, team qualifications, feasibility of the timeline, and price.

What Questions Should You Ask Agencies in Your RFP?

The questions you include in your RFP shape the usefulness of the proposals you receive. Generic questions produce generic answers. Specific questions that require agencies to demonstrate knowledge of your situation, your industry, or a specific technical challenge produce answers that reveal genuine capability and experience rather than polished capability statements that could have been written for any client.

“The most revealing questions in a website RFP are the ones that ask agencies to describe a specific past experience rather than to describe their general process. ‘Describe a project where you redesigned a site without losing significant organic traffic’ tells you far more about an agency’s SEO competence than ‘describe your SEO approach’ ever will.” – Strategy Team, Emulent Marketing.

Questions that surface genuine capability and fit in a website design RFP:

• Describe a website project similar in scope or industry to ours and walk us through the approach, challenges, and outcomes. This forces agencies to connect their past work to your specific context rather than describing their process in the abstract. Ask for measurable outcomes where available: traffic changes, conversion rate improvements, load time improvements.
• Who will be the day-to-day project lead on our account, and what is their experience? Proposals are often built by senior staff who won’t be doing the daily work. Naming the specific project manager and their background early in the relationship prevents bait-and-switch that can lead to client dissatisfaction after the contract is signed.
• Describe your discovery process and what you need from our team during that phase. A well-defined discovery process signals that the agency builds understanding before building pages. The answer also reveals how much your team will need to contribute and what the internal time commitment looks like beyond the financial investment.
• How do you approach protecting existing SEO rankings during a website redesign or relaunch? This question tests SEO competence directly. Agencies without clear answers on redirect mapping, pre-launch crawl comparisons, and post-launch monitoring are likely to treat SEO as an afterthought rather than an integrated part of the build.
• How do you handle scope changes during a project, and what does that process look like? Scope changes are inevitable in website projects. An agency’s answer to this question reveals how transparent and fair its change-order process is and whether you’re likely to face budget surprises after the project begins.
• What does your quality assurance process look like before launch? A specific answer that covers cross-browser testing, device testing, accessibility compliance checks, performance benchmarking, and link validation indicates a disciplined launch process. A vague answer about “thorough testing” indicates a process that may not be as systematic as it sounds.
• What do you need from us to stay on schedule, and what are the most common client-side causes of delays? This question reveals the agency’s honest expectations for your team’s involvement and surfaces potential friction points before they cause problems. Agencies that answer this question specifically are the ones that have run enough projects to know where delays actually come from.

What Should a Website Design RFP Template Look Like?

The following template structure provides a complete framework for your specific project. Adjust the length and detail of each section based on the complexity of your project and the level of specification required by your procurement process.

Website Design RFP Template Structure:

• Cover page: Organization name, project title, RFP issue date, proposal due date, contact name and email for questions, submission instructions.
• Section 1 – About Our Organization: Two to three paragraphs describing what your organization does, who it serves, its market position, and the role the website plays in your marketing and sales process.
• Section 2 – Project Overview and Goals: Why this project is happening now, your primary goals for the new website listed in priority order, and the key metrics you’ll use to measure success in the 12 months following launch.
• Section 3 – Current Website Assessment: URL, CMS platform, approximate page count, current monthly traffic, current conversion rate on primary conversion goals, and a description of the specific problems the new site must solve.
• Section 4 – Target Audience: Primary and secondary audience descriptions, including their goals when visiting the site, their decision-making process, and any research or customer data that describes how they currently engage with your online presence.
• Section 5 – Functional and Technical Requirements: CMS requirements, hosting environment, third-party integrations, accessibility standards (specify WCAG 2.1 AA if required), performance targets, browser and device support, security requirements, and any compliance obligations.
• Section 6 – Design and Brand Requirements: Whether brand guidelines exist and how binding they are, any visual directions you want explored or avoided, and examples of sites whose design you admire, along with a brief explanation of why each appeals to you.
• Section 7 – Content Responsibilities: Who is writing new content, and who is responsible for content migration? Clarify which pages carry over from the current site, which will be rewritten, and which are new. If content is the agency’s responsibility, specify the number of pages and the content types included.
• Section 8 – SEO Requirements: Expectations for on-page SEO structure, redirect strategy for changed URLs, Core Web Vitals performance targets, and any specific requirements around schema markup, sitemap generation, or Google Search Console integration.
• Section 9 – Project Timeline: Target launch date, any fixed milestones, and the start date you’re working toward for the engagement.
• Section 10 – Budget: Your budget range for the project and whether that range includes or excludes content development, photography, stock image licensing, or ongoing maintenance.
• Section 11 – Proposal Requirements: Specific content you want in the proposal: company overview, relevant project examples, proposed approach, team structure, project timeline, and itemized pricing. Include format requirements, page limits, and the submission deadline and method.
• Section 12 – Evaluation Criteria: The factors you’ll use to evaluate proposals and their relative weights. A clear rubric benefits agencies when writing proposals and helps your team compare them. Example weights: relevant experience 25%, proposed approach and methodology 30%, team qualifications 20%, timeline 10%, price 15%.
• Section 13 – Procurement Process and Timeline: The full timeline from RFP distribution to vendor selection, including when you’ll accept clarifying questions, when shortlisted agencies will be notified for presentations, and when you expect to make a final selection.

What Contract and Ownership Provisions Should the RFP Address?

Website design RFPs that don’t address contract expectations leave important questions unresolved until after you’ve selected a vendor, at which point your negotiating position has weakened significantly. Stating your expectations about intellectual property ownership, asset delivery, and post-launch support in the RFP allows agencies to price those provisions into their proposals and filters out agencies whose standard contract terms conflict with your requirements before you’ve invested time in evaluating their proposals.

Contract provisions to address in your RFP:

• Intellectual property ownership: Specify that all deliverables, including design files, code, content, and documentation produced for this project, transfer to your organization upon final payment. Some agencies retain ownership of design files or code components and license them to clients rather than transferring ownership. Stating your ownership expectation in the RFP prevents this from becoming a post-selection negotiation point.
• Post-launch support and warranty period: Specify that you expect a warranty period during which the agency is responsible for fixing bugs and defects discovered after launch at no additional cost. A standard warranty period for website projects is 30 to 90 days post-launch. Asking agencies to describe their warranty terms in their proposals allows you to compare these provisions across respondents.
• Access to all accounts and platforms: State explicitly that all accounts created during the project, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, hosting accounts, domain registrar access, and the CMS administration account, must be created under your organization’s ownership rather than the agency’s. This prevents vendor lock-in and protects your ability to continue operating the site independently if the agency relationship ends.
• Maintenance and retainer options: If you anticipate ongoing maintenance, updates, or marketing support after launch, ask agencies to describe and price their post-launch service options in their proposals. Understanding the ongoing cost structure before you select a vendor lets you factor the full relationship cost into your evaluation, rather than being surprised by maintenance pricing after the project is complete.

“Ownership of deliverables and platform access are the contract provisions that cause the most problems when they’re not addressed upfront. We’ve seen businesses finish a website project and then discover they don’t own the design files, don’t have admin access to their own CMS, or can’t make changes without paying the agency for every update. Specifying your expectations in the RFP prevents every one of those situations.” – Strategy Team, Emulent Marketing.

How Do You Evaluate Proposals Once You Receive Them?

Evaluating website design proposals fairly and efficiently requires consistently applying your stated criteria to all respondents, rather than defaulting to gut reactions or the visual appeal of the proposal document itself. A well-formatted proposal from an agency that didn’t answer your questions is less valuable than a plainly formatted one from an agency that engaged specifically with your goals, your problems, and your requirements.

A practical approach to comparing website design proposals:

• Score each proposal against your stated evaluation criteria: Use the evaluation rubric you included in your RFP to assign a score to each proposal for each criterion. Having multiple team members score independently and then comparing scores surfaces disagreements that should be discussed rather than averaged away. A scoring spreadsheet with one row per agency and one column per evaluation criterion makes direct comparison straightforward and auditable.
• Shortlist two to three agencies for presentations or follow-up conversations: Written proposals rarely contain all the information you need to make a final decision confidently. Shortlisting the two or three strongest respondents for a live presentation or a structured follow-up call gives you the opportunity to assess how the team communicates, how they respond to questions they weren’t prepared for, and whether the working relationship feels right in a way that written proposals can’t reveal.
• Check references from similar past projects: Ask each shortlisted agency for two or three references from projects similar in scope or industry to yours, and contact those references directly. Ask specifically about timeline adherence, communication quality, how the agency handled problems when they arose, and whether the final deliverable matched what was proposed.
• Evaluate the proposal’s specificity to your situation: Proposals that demonstrate a specific understanding of your business, your audience, your goals, and your current site’s problems were written by agencies that read your RFP carefully and engaged with your context rather than recycling a standard proposal template. That specificity predicts how the agency will approach the actual work and how much they’ll invest in understanding your business as the project progresses.

A Strong RFP Attracts Stronger Proposals and Better Project Outcomes

Putting time into a clear, well-organized RFP pays off during vendor selection and throughout your project. Agencies that get a specific RFP have fewer questions, can price the work more accurately, and start the project with a better understanding of your goals and expectations. Your RFP sets the tone for the whole relationship, and a professional, well-prepared one shows that your organization will be a good client.

At Emulent Marketing, we help businesses create website strategies and find the right agency partners for their goals and budgets. If you’re planning a website redesign and need advice on project planning, reviewing proposals, or managing the process, we’re here to help. Reach out to the Emulent team if you want support with your website strategy.

What Is a Website Design RFP and When Should You Write One?

A Request for Proposal is a structured document that invites vendors to submit proposals for a defined project. In website design, an RFP describes your organization, your current website situation, your goals for the new site, your technical requirements, your timeline, and your evaluation criteria so that agencies can respond with a scoped, priced proposal specific to your needs rather than a generic capability overview.

Not every website project warrants a formal RFP process. For smaller projects, a direct conversation with one or two agencies followed by a written scope of work is often faster and produces equally good results. An RFP is most useful when the project is large enough that multiple agencies deserve serious consideration, when your organization requires a competitive bidding process for procurement or governance reasons, when the technical and strategic requirements are complex enough that a structured document prevents misalignment from the start, or when multiple internal departments have requirements that need to be captured in a single source document.

“The RFP process works best when it’s treated as a conversation starter rather than a final specification. You want agencies to respond with their expertise and their approach, not just confirm that they can check boxes on your requirements list. The best RFPs give enough context that an agency can tell you something useful you hadn’t thought of. The worst ones are so prescriptive they filter out the agencies most likely to improve on your thinking.” – Strategy Team, Emulent Marketing

What Should You Do Before Writing Your RFP?

The quality of the proposals you receive is directly proportional to the clarity of the thinking you do before you start writing. An RFP written before your internal team has aligned on goals, budget, and success metrics produces inconsistent proposals that are nearly impossible to compare and evaluate. The pre-RFP work takes time but prevents the far more expensive outcome of selecting a vendor based on a misaligned proposal and discovering the misalignment mid-project.

Internal alignment work to complete before writing your RFP:

• Define the problem the website needs to solve: Before specifying what the website should look like or include, align your team on what the current website isn’t doing well and what a new one needs to accomplish. Specific problems produce specific goals. “We need a new website” is not a goal. “Our current website generates 12 qualified leads per month and we need 40” is a goal that agencies can build toward and measure against.
• Establish a realistic budget range: Including a budget range in your RFP produces more useful proposals than withholding it. Agencies that know your budget can tell you honestly whether it’s realistic for your goals and what tradeoffs you’d be making at that investment level. Agencies guessing at your budget will propose across a wide range of scope, making it impossible to compare what you’re getting for the money across respondents. A range rather than a fixed number gives agencies flexibility while still anchoring their proposals in your financial reality.
• Identify all internal stakeholders and their requirements: Website projects frequently involve input from marketing, IT, sales, legal, and executive leadership. Each group may have requirements that affect the project scope, the technology choices, or the content strategy. Collecting those requirements before writing the RFP prevents scope additions mid-project that disrupt timelines and budgets after a vendor has already been selected.
• Audit your current website’s performance and problems: Pull your current site’s analytics data, review your Core Web Vitals scores in Google Search Console, and document the specific performance gaps the new site is meant to close. This data gives agencies a concrete baseline to improve against and signals that your organization approaches this decision with data rather than just aesthetic preferences.
• Decide which decisions you’re making versus which you’re inviting proposals on: Some requirements are fixed: your CMS must be WordPress because your team already knows it, your site must meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards because of legal requirements, your hosting must stay with your current provider. Other decisions are genuinely open: the visual design direction, the information architecture approach, the content strategy. Being clear about which decisions are made versus which are open prevents agencies from proposing alternatives to fixed requirements while encouraging genuine strategic input on the decisions that are still available.

What Sections Should Every Website Design RFP Include?

A complete website design RFP gives agencies the context they need to propose accurately and the criteria they need to respond strategically. The sections below represent a complete structure that works for most mid-to-large website projects. Smaller projects can use a condensed version of this structure while keeping the same core elements: who you are, what you need, what you require technically, what your timeline is, and how you’ll decide.

The core sections of a complete website design RFP:

• Organization overview: A brief description of your organization, what it does, who it serves, its size, its market position, and the context in which the website operates. This section should be concise but substantive enough that an agency with no prior knowledge of your business can understand your category, your audience, and the competitive environment you operate in. Include your primary business goals and how the website connects to them.
• Project background and goals: Explain why you’re building or rebuilding the website now. What is the specific trigger for this project, whether a rebranding, a business pivot, poor performance metrics, outdated technology, or a new strategic direction? List your primary goals for the new site in order of priority. Goals should be measurable where possible: “increase organic search traffic by 40% within 12 months of launch” is more useful than “improve SEO.”
• Current website assessment: Describe your current website including its URL, its CMS, its approximate page count, its current performance metrics, and the specific problems you’re trying to solve. If you have analytics data that illustrates performance gaps, summarize it here. This context helps agencies calibrate the scope of work required and identify whether the project is a rebuild from scratch or a redesign of an existing structure.
• Target audience description: Describe the primary and secondary audiences the website needs to serve. Include demographic and behavioral characteristics, the goals each audience segment has when visiting the site, and any research or customer data that illuminates how those audiences currently engage with your online presence. Agencies that understand your audience can propose design and content approaches suited to real user needs rather than generic best practices.
• Functional and technical requirements: List the specific technical requirements the new website must meet. This section should cover CMS requirements, hosting environment, third-party integrations, accessibility standards, performance benchmarks, browser and device support, security requirements, and any compliance obligations relevant to your industry. Be specific: “must integrate with Salesforce via API” is a requirement. “Should work with our CRM” is not.
• Design and brand requirements: Describe any brand constraints that govern the visual design. Include whether you have existing brand guidelines, whether the agency is expected to follow them strictly or refresh them as part of the project, and any design directions or examples you want to share. If you have specific visual preferences or strong preferences against certain directions, state them directly to prevent proposals that spend significant effort in a direction you would reject.
• Content strategy and migration requirements: Clarify who is responsible for writing new content, whether the agency, your internal team, or a combination. Describe the approximate number of pages on the current site, how many will carry over to the new site, and whether content migration is part of the project scope. Content responsibilities are one of the most common sources of budget and timeline disputes in website projects, and addressing them explicitly in the RFP prevents misalignment from becoming a problem after the contract is signed.
• SEO requirements: Specify that the project must include SEO best practices baked into the build, including proper page hierarchy, clean URL structures, meta tag control, schema markup capability, Core Web Vitals optimization, and a redirect strategy for all changed URLs. If your current site has existing organic search rankings that need to be protected through the transition, state that explicitly and ask agencies to describe their approach to traffic preservation during a site launch.
• Project timeline: Provide your target launch date or the date range within which launch needs to occur, along with any fixed milestones that the timeline must accommodate, such as a product launch, an event, a fiscal year start, or a board presentation. Ask agencies to propose a project schedule within those constraints and to flag any timeline risks they identify based on the scope described.
• Budget range: Include your budget range for the project. If internal policy prevents you from disclosing a budget, at minimum include a range broad enough that agencies can determine whether the engagement is viable for them to pursue and whether your budget is realistic for the scope you’ve described.
• Proposal requirements and evaluation criteria: Tell agencies exactly what you want them to submit, including the format, page or length limits, the specific questions you want answered, and the date and method of submission. List your evaluation criteria and their relative weights so that agencies can see what you value most and structure their proposals accordingly. Common criteria include relevant experience and portfolio, proposed approach and methodology, team qualifications, timeline feasibility, and price.

What Questions Should You Ask Agencies in Your RFP?

The questions you include in your RFP shape the usefulness of the proposals you receive. Generic questions produce generic answers. Specific questions that require agencies to demonstrate knowledge of your situation, your industry, or a specific technical challenge produce answers that reveal genuine capability and experience rather than polished capability statements that could have been written for any client.

“The most revealing questions in a website RFP are the ones that ask agencies to describe a specific past experience rather than to describe their general process. ‘Describe a project where you redesigned a site without losing significant organic traffic’ tells you far more about an agency’s SEO competence than ‘describe your SEO approach’ ever will.” – Strategy Team, Emulent Marketing

Questions that surface genuine capability and fit in a website design RFP:

• Describe a website project similar in scope or industry to ours and walk us through the approach, challenges, and outcomes. This forces agencies to connect their past work to your specific context rather than describing their process in the abstract. Ask for measurable outcomes where available: traffic changes, conversion rate improvements, load time improvements.
• Who will be the day-to-day project lead on our account and what is their experience? Proposals are often built by senior staff who won’t be doing the daily work. Naming the specific project manager and their background early in the relationship prevents the bait-and-switch that produces client dissatisfaction after the contract is signed.
• Describe your discovery process and what you need from our team during that phase. A well-defined discovery process signals that the agency builds understanding before building pages. The answer also reveals how much your team will need to contribute and what the internal time commitment looks like beyond the financial investment.
• How do you approach protecting existing SEO rankings during a website redesign or relaunch? This question tests SEO competence directly. Agencies without a specific answer involving redirect mapping, pre-launch crawl comparison, and post-launch monitoring are likely to treat SEO as an afterthought rather than as an integrated part of the build.
• How do you handle scope changes during a project and what does that process look like? Scope changes are inevitable in website projects. An agency’s answer to this question reveals how transparent and fair their change order process is and whether you’re likely to face budget surprises after the project begins.
• What does your quality assurance process look like before launch? A specific answer covering cross-browser testing, device testing, accessibility compliance checking, performance benchmarking, and link validation indicates a disciplined launch process. A vague answer about “thorough testing” indicates a process that may not be as systematic as it sounds.
• What do you need from us to stay on schedule and what are the most common client-side causes of delays? This question reveals the honest expectations the agency has of your team’s involvement and surfaces potential friction points before they cause problems. Agencies that answer this question specifically are the ones that have run enough projects to know where delays actually come from.

What Should a Website Design RFP Template Look Like?

The following template structure gives you a complete framework to fill in for your specific project. Adjust the length and detail of each section based on the complexity of your project and the level of specification your procurement process requires.

Website Design RFP Template Structure:

• Cover page: Organization name, project title, RFP issue date, proposal due date, contact name and email for questions, submission instructions.
• Section 1 – About Our Organization: Two to three paragraphs describing what your organization does, who it serves, its market position, and the role the website plays in your marketing and sales process.
• Section 2 – Project Overview and Goals: Why this project is happening now, your primary goals for the new website listed in priority order, and the key metrics you’ll use to measure success in the 12 months following launch.
• Section 3 – Current Website Assessment: URL, CMS platform, approximate page count, current monthly traffic, current conversion rate on primary conversion goals, and a description of the specific problems the new site must solve.
• Section 4 – Target Audience: Primary and secondary audience descriptions including their goals when visiting the site, their decision-making process, and any research or customer data that describes how they currently engage with your online presence.
• Section 5 – Functional and Technical Requirements: CMS requirements, hosting environment, third-party integrations, accessibility standards (specify WCAG 2.1 AA if required), performance targets, browser and device support, security requirements, and any compliance obligations.
• Section 6 – Design and Brand Requirements: Whether brand guidelines exist and how binding they are, any visual directions you want explored or avoided, and examples of sites whose design you admire along with a brief explanation of why each appeals to you.
• Section 7 – Content Responsibilities: Who is writing new content and who is responsible for content migration. Clarify which pages carry over from the current site, which will be rewritten, and which are new. If content is the agency’s responsibility, specify the number of pages and the content types included.
• Section 8 – SEO Requirements: Expectations for on-page SEO structure, redirect strategy for changed URLs, Core Web Vitals performance targets, and any specific requirements around schema markup, sitemap generation, or Google Search Console integration.
• Section 9 – Project Timeline: Target launch date, any fixed milestones, and the start date you’re working toward for the engagement.
• Section 10 – Budget: Your budget range for the project and whether that range includes or excludes content development, photography, stock image licensing, or ongoing maintenance.
• Section 11 – Proposal Requirements: Specific content you want in the proposal: company overview, relevant project examples, proposed approach, team structure, project timeline, and itemized pricing. Include format requirements, page limits, and the submission deadline and method.
• Section 12 – Evaluation Criteria: The factors you’ll use to evaluate proposals and their relative weights. A clear rubric benefits agencies writing proposals and your team comparing them. Example weights: relevant experience 25%, proposed approach and methodology 30%, team qualifications 20%, timeline 10%, price 15%.
• Section 13 – Procurement Process and Timeline: The full timeline from RFP distribution to vendor selection, including when you’ll accept clarifying questions, when shortlisted agencies will be notified for presentations, and when you expect to make a final selection.

What Contract and Ownership Provisions Should the RFP Address?

Website design RFPs that don’t address contract expectations leave important questions unresolved until after you’ve selected a vendor, at which point your negotiating position has weakened significantly. Stating your expectations about intellectual property ownership, asset delivery, and post-launch support in the RFP allows agencies to price those provisions into their proposals and filters out agencies whose standard contract terms conflict with your requirements before you’ve invested time in evaluating their proposals.

Contract provisions to address in your RFP:

• Intellectual property ownership: Specify that all deliverables, including design files, code, content, and documentation produced for this project, transfer to your organization upon final payment. Some agencies retain ownership of design files or code components and license them to clients rather than transferring ownership. Stating your ownership expectation in the RFP prevents this from becoming a post-selection negotiation point.
• Post-launch support and warranty period: Specify that you expect a warranty period during which the agency is responsible for fixing bugs and defects discovered after launch at no additional cost. A standard warranty period for website projects is 30 to 90 days post-launch. Asking agencies to describe their warranty terms in their proposal allows you to compare this provision across respondents.
• Access to all accounts and platforms: State explicitly that all accounts created during the project, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, hosting accounts, domain registrar access, and the CMS administration account, must be created under your organization’s ownership rather than the agency’s. This prevents vendor lock-in and protects your ability to continue operating the site independently if the agency relationship ends.
• Maintenance and retainer options: If you anticipate needing ongoing maintenance, updates, or marketing support after launch, ask agencies to describe and price their post-launch service options in the proposal. Understanding the ongoing cost structure before you select a vendor allows you to factor the full relationship cost into your evaluation rather than being surprised by maintenance pricing after the project is complete.

“Ownership of deliverables and platform access are the contract provisions that cause the most problems when they’re not addressed upfront. We’ve seen businesses finish a website project and then discover they don’t own the design files, don’t have admin access to their own CMS, or can’t make changes without paying the agency for every update. Specifying your expectations in the RFP prevents every one of those situations.” – Strategy Team, Emulent Marketing

How Do You Evaluate Proposals Once You Receive Them?

Evaluating website design proposals fairly and efficiently requires applying your stated criteria consistently across all respondents rather than defaulting to gut reactions or the visual appeal of the proposal document itself. A well-formatted proposal from an agency that didn’t answer your questions is less valuable than a plainly formatted one from an agency that engaged specifically with your goals, your problems, and your requirements.

A practical approach to comparing website design proposals:

• Score each proposal against your stated evaluation criteria: Use the evaluation rubric you included in your RFP to assign a score to each proposal for each criterion. Having multiple team members score independently and then comparing scores surfaces disagreements that should be discussed rather than averaged away. A scoring spreadsheet with one row per agency and one column per evaluation criterion makes direct comparison straightforward and auditable.
• Shortlist two to three agencies for presentations or follow-up conversations: Written proposals rarely contain all the information you need to make a final decision confidently. Shortlisting the two or three strongest respondents for a live presentation or a structured follow-up call gives you the opportunity to assess how the team communicates, how they respond to questions they weren’t prepared for, and whether the working relationship feels right in a way that written proposals can’t reveal.
• Check references from similar past projects: Ask each shortlisted agency for two or three references from projects similar in scope or industry to yours and contact those references directly. Ask specifically about timeline adherence, communication quality, how the agency handled problems when they arose, and whether the final deliverable matched what was proposed.
• Evaluate the proposal’s specificity to your situation: Proposals that demonstrate specific understanding of your business, your audience, your goals, and your current site’s problems were written by agencies that read your RFP carefully and engaged with your context rather than recycling a standard proposal template. That specificity predicts how the agency will approach the actual work and how much they’ll invest in understanding your business as the project progresses.

A Strong RFP Attracts Stronger Proposals and Better Project Outcomes

The effort invested in a thorough, well-organized RFP pays dividends throughout the vendor selection process and into the project itself. Agencies that respond to a clear, specific RFP have fewer unanswered questions, price the work more accurately, and begin the engagement with better alignment on goals and expectations than those responding to a vague document. The RFP sets the tone for the entire relationship, and a professional, well-prepared one signals that your organization will be a productive client to work with.

At Emulent Marketing, we work with businesses to build website strategies and select the right agency partners for their goals and budgets. If you’re preparing for a website redesign and want guidance on scoping the project, evaluating proposals, or managing the build process, we can help. Contact the Emulent team today if you need help with your website strategy.