Before you hire a studio to build your website, skip the portfolio. Check who owns the code, who hosts it, and who's still answering the phone six months after launch. Most people vet the fun part first: the visuals, the case studies, the pitch. It's the boring part where people get burned, usually in a contract clause nobody read closely, or a hosting arrangement nobody thought to ask about. Choosing a web design agency for anything beyond a single page starts there.
Ask for full code ownership and repository access at handoff. A studio that hedges is telling you something true about how the relationship will go. Some shops build on a proprietary template or a locked platform on purpose, so leaving later means starting over instead of just switching hosts. Ask directly: at handoff, do you own a repository you can move anywhere, or are you renting a system only this studio can touch. A studio confident in its own work hands over the keys without flinching. One that stalls, changes the subject, or quotes an extra fee just to export your own site has already answered you. This isn't a clause to negotiate later. It's the difference between owning a website and leasing one from a landlord who can raise the rent whenever they like.
Hosting is where a lot of studios get vague, often on purpose. Many resell shared or VPS hosting under their own brand, so you never learn who the real underlying host is, or what your account even looks like from the outside. Ask plainly: where does this site live, under whose account, and what happens to it the day the contract ends. A studio that answers in one sentence, with a name you can look up, is being straight with you. One that talks around it, or implies you wouldn't understand the details anyway, is setting up a situation where leaving them costs you your site's uptime along with the relationship.
If a proposal never mentions security, backups, or what happens after launch, that's not an oversight. It usually means the studio's job ends the moment the site ships. Everything that breaks afterward becomes your problem, solved alone or paid to someone else to fix. A studio that expects to still be useful in six months offers some version of a maintenance retainer, spelled out in the proposal, not improvised later once something's already broken. You don't have to take the retainer. You do have to hear it offered.
Watch how a studio behaves before you've signed anything, because that behavior doesn't improve afterward. A team that asks few questions on the first call, promises results it has no way of knowing it can deliver, or can't explain in plain language how it actually works, won't suddenly turn transparent once the invoice is paid. The studios worth hiring push back. They'll tell you when an idea won't work, tie their quote to a written scope instead of a vague estimate, and treat the discovery call like the start of a working relationship, not a sales pitch with a deadline.
Before you sign anything, ask the three questions above out loud: who owns the code, who hosts it, who maintains it once it's live. A studio with nothing to hide answers all three without hesitation. One that dodges even a single one has already told you what working with them will be like. Better to find that out now than six months into a contract.