Dubai has more web design agencies than it has good ones. From the outside they all look the same: a slick Instagram, a portfolio page, a "premium" package. The difference between a studio that ships and one that goes quiet after the deposit only shows up when you ask the right questions — so ask them before you pay, not after.

Here are twelve, grouped into four tests. Send them over WhatsApp. How an agency answers — and how quickly the conversation gets uncomfortable — tells you almost everything.

Test one: the portfolio — live links or nothing

Screenshots prove nothing. Anyone can mock up a homepage in an afternoon or lift one from a template marketplace. A real portfolio is a list of URLs you can open on your phone right now.

  1. "Send me live links to three sites you built — not screenshots." Then actually open them, on mobile. If a link is dead, slow, or broken on a phone, that is the level of care your project will get after launch.
  2. "Which parts of this did you build, and which came from a template?" Templates aren't a crime — lying about them is. An agency that claims custom work it didn't do will claim finished work it hasn't done.
  3. "Walk me through one project: the brief, the problem, the result." Weak agencies show pictures. Strong ones can explain decisions.

Hold us to the same standard — our live work is on the projects page, and the thinking behind it is in the case studies. Click the links. That's the whole test.

Test two: payment terms and who owns what

This is where clients actually get hurt. Not by ugly design — by fine print that was never printed.

  1. "What's the payment split, and will you put scope, timeline and price in writing before we start?" The only acceptable answer is yes. We work on 30% to start and 70% on completion, with everything in writing first; anything vaguer is an invitation to invoice you creatively.
  2. "Who owns the domain, the hosting account, and the source code when we're done?" The answer must be: you, all three. The oldest trap in this market is the agency that registers your domain under its own name. You don't own your website — you rent it, and the rent goes up the day you try to leave.
  3. "What happens after launch when something breaks?" Everything breaks eventually. Ask how long bug fixes stay free — ours are free for a full year. If support is a paid retainer from day one, budget for it now, not when the contact form dies.

If an agency won't put scope, timeline, price and ownership in writing before taking a deposit, that's not a paperwork issue. It's a preview.

Test three: speed and SEO claims you can verify yourself

"SEO-optimised" and "lightning fast" are the two most decorative phrases in web design. Both are checkable in minutes, for free.

  1. "What are the Core Web Vitals on the last site you shipped?" Then paste that URL into PageSpeed Insights yourself. The passing thresholds are public: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. An agency that can't discuss those numbers is selling a word, not a result.
  2. "Can you guarantee me first place on Google?" This one is a trap — for them. The only honest answer is no, because nobody controls Google's rankings. What an agency can guarantee is the groundwork: clean structure, fast pages, proper metadata, a mobile-first build. A guaranteed ranking is the signature move of an agency planning to be unreachable in six months.
  3. "If I need Arabic, do you build real RTL — or just translate the text?" In the UAE this matters. Proper right-to-left support means the whole layout mirrors: navigation, alignment, icons, forms. A left-to-right site with Arabic words poured in looks broken to every Arabic reader — the exact audience you added it for.

What's included in a build should be listed, not implied. Compare any proposal you receive against what we spell out in our services — if their list is shorter and vaguer, that's your answer.

Test four: red flags in the first WhatsApp conversation

The first chat is a free sample of the working relationship. Three questions to close with.

  1. "What do you need from me before you can quote?" A serious studio asks about your goals, pages, content and deadline before naming a number. A price that arrives after one message, with zero questions asked, isn't a quote — it's bait, and it will grow.
  2. "What's a realistic timeline, and what usually causes delays?" Anyone promising a full custom site in 48 hours is describing a template, not a build. Honest ranges look like ours: landing pages in 1 week, full sites and web apps in 2–4 weeks. The second half of the question matters more — an agency that can name what causes delays (usually content and approvals) has actually shipped before.
  3. "What happens when I ask for changes?" The dangerous model is per-round revision billing on a vaguely defined scope, where every tweak becomes an invoice. The clean model is a written scope with revisions inside it not billed per round. Get the revision policy in writing, next to the price.

What to do with the answers

You don't need an agency to ace all twelve. You need it to answer all twelve without flinching. Evasion on ownership, a guaranteed ranking, a price with no questions asked — any one of those is reason enough to walk, because these are the easy questions. The hard ones come mid-project.

And yes, the test cuts both ways. Ask us the same twelve on WhatsApp at +971 56 160 8606 — or skip the pricing dance and see your price in under a minute.