Website Design
A website RFP is worth writing when you want three or more agencies bidding on the same project and you need their numbers to mean the same thing. Most buyers write the wrong document. They describe the website they picture in their head, get back nine proposals that each solve a different problem, and end up choosing on price because price is the only line that lines up. Here is the structure we ask clients to use, the seven sections that decide proposal quality, and a scoring method that survives contact with real bids.
What a Good Website RFP Actually Does
A website RFP is a short document that tells agencies what your business needs, what the new site has to accomplish, what you can spend, and how you will pick a winner. Its job is to make different agencies answer the same questions, so their proposals can be compared line by line.
That framing matters more than the format. An RFP that says “we need a modern, mobile friendly website with a fresh look” invites every agency to guess. An RFP that says “our service pages convert at under one percent and our phone team says half of callers cannot find pricing” tells them what to solve. In our own client work, the requests that produce genuinely comparable bids almost always describe symptoms and numbers rather than features and adjectives.
One worked example runs through this guide: a regional HVAC company with a 30 page site, an online booking requirement, and a budget somewhere near $18,000. Every section below shows what that company would write.
The Seven Sections Every Website RFP Needs
Seven sections are enough, and each one exists to remove a specific kind of guessing from the proposals. Write them in this order. The whole document should take a marketing lead about four hours to produce, and it saves far more than that in proposal review.
| 01 | Business context, in 200 to 300 words. Who you are, what you sell, who buys it, and what changed recently. The HVAC company writes that it added two service areas last year and its current site still lists one. Agencies price scope, and scope comes from context. |
| 02 | Three to five measurable goals. Not “look more professional.” Something like “increase booked service calls from the site by 25 percent within six months” and “cut the phone team’s pricing questions in half.” Measurable goals are also how you hold the winner accountable after launch. |
| 03 | Scope, counted in pages and features. State page count, how many pages need new copy, and every piece of functionality by name: booking, payments, a service area finder, a customer portal. The HVAC example lists 30 pages, 12 needing new copy, and one booking integration. Page and feature counts move a quote more than anything else, which is also why website cost estimates vary so widely without them. |
| 04 | Technical and compliance requirements. Name the platform if you have one, and set two standards explicitly. Ask for WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, the level referenced by most website accessibility requirements, and published by the W3C. Ask for passing Core Web Vitals, which Google defines as a Largest Contentful Paint at or under 2.5 seconds, documented on web.dev. Both are cheap to require upfront and expensive to retrofit. |
| 05 | A real budget range and a launch date. Write “$15,000 to $22,000” and “live before the March heating season ends.” Agencies that cannot work in that range will decline, which is the point. Withholding the budget does not get you a better price, it gets you proposals aimed at three different projects. |
| 06 | What you will provide, and by when. Copy, photography, logins, a single decision maker, and review turnaround. Content is the most common reason a website project slips, and an RFP that promises “final copy for 12 pages by week three” is a promise the agency will price against. |
| 07 | How you will decide, with weights and dates. Publish your criteria and their weights, the questions deadline, the shortlist date, and the decision date. Agencies invest more in proposals when the process looks real, and you get better work for free. |
Want the seven sections filled in for your project?
Dorian Media Group answers RFPs every month, and we are happy to pressure test yours before it goes out. Bring your draft to a call and we will tell you which sections will produce wildly different bids, or see how we scope work on our website design and development page. Book a discovery call and bring the document.
What to Leave Out of a Website RFP
Leave out anything that prescribes the solution or costs agencies time without changing your decision. Long boilerplate sections are the fastest way to lose the four or five firms you most wanted to hear from, because good agencies triage RFPs by how much unpaid work they demand.
| Include | Skip |
| Your traffic and conversion numbers | A required sitemap you drew yourself |
| Two or three sites you admire, and why | Specific fonts, colors, or layouts |
| Two relevant case studies requested | Spec designs or free mockups |
| A named point of contact | A no questions allowed rule |
| Your budget range | Ten pages of legal terms up front |
Asking for spec work deserves its own warning. Any agency willing to design your homepage for free before a contract exists is either desperate or planning to reuse something. The firms whose portfolios you actually want will decline, quietly, and you will never know they read it.
How Long Should a Website RFP Be, and Who Should Get It?
Keep it to six to ten pages and send it to four to six agencies. That is the range where you get enough variety to learn something without spending a month reading. Below three bids you have no basis for comparison; above eight you are running an administrative project, not a buying decision.
Pick the recipients before you write, because the list changes the document. Four boutique studios and two large firms will return proposals that differ by a factor of three on price, and you should decide in advance whether you actually want that spread. Our guide to how to choose a web design agency covers the vetting questions worth asking before anyone gets your RFP at all.
Give agencies two to three weeks to respond and hold a single written questions round in the middle, with every answer sent to every bidder. Compressed deadlines filter for firms with idle capacity, which is rarely the filter you meant to apply.
How to Score the Proposals You Get Back
Score every proposal against fixed weights you set before the first one arrives, because the alternative is choosing whoever presented best on the day. Five criteria are enough, and price should carry no more than a quarter of the total.
| ✓ | Understanding of the problem, 30 percent. Did they restate your goals in their own words, or paste your RFP back at you? This single criterion predicts project outcomes better than any other in our experience. |
| ✓ | Relevant proof, 25 percent. Two case studies with real before and after numbers from businesses that look like yours. A logo wall is not proof. |
| ✓ | Price and what it covers, 25 percent. Normalize every bid first. Strip out items only one agency quoted, then compare. The HVAC company found a $4,000 gap between two proposals that vanished once content migration and redirect mapping were added to the cheaper one. |
| ✓ | Team and process, 15 percent. Who does the work, who you talk to weekly, and what happens when a deadline slips. Ask whether the people in the pitch are the people on the project. |
| ✓ | Post launch support, 5 percent. Small weight, large consequences. Get the monthly care figure in writing now, because a site with no maintenance plan degrades within a year. |
One rule saves more money than the scoring itself: never compare a rebuild bid against a refresh bid. They answer different questions, and the cheaper one usually is not solving your problem. If the proposals you get back disagree about which one you need, that disagreement is the real finding, and our breakdown of what a website redesign should cost is the fastest way to settle it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a website RFP for a small project?
Usually not. Below roughly $10,000, a one page brief and three conversations will get you further than a formal document. RFPs earn their keep when the project is large enough that a bad choice costs real money, or when your organization requires a documented, defensible selection process.
Should a website RFP include a budget?
Yes, as a range. Hiding the budget does not produce lower bids, it produces proposals scoped for three different projects, and you lose the ability to compare them. A range such as $15,000 to $22,000 tells agencies what tradeoffs to make and lets the wrong fits decline early.
What is the difference between an RFP and an RFQ?
An RFQ asks for a price on work you have already specified. An RFP asks agencies how they would solve your problem and what that approach costs. Website projects almost always call for an RFP, because the approach is most of what you are buying.
How many agencies should receive the RFP?
Four to six. Fewer than three gives you nothing to compare, and more than eight turns proposal review into a second job. Vet the list first so every recipient is one you would genuinely hire, then let the proposals decide between them.
How long does the website RFP process take?
Plan on six to eight weeks from writing to signed contract. That is roughly one week to draft, two to three weeks for agencies to respond, one to two weeks for shortlist calls, and a week for references and paperwork. Rushing the response window mostly filters for availability.
Dorian Media Group
Get proposals you can actually compare
Send us the draft before it goes out and we will tell you which sections are going to produce bids $10,000 apart. Or skip the paperwork entirely, walk us through the site you need, and we will scope it on the call. Either way you leave knowing what the project should cost and how long it should take.
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DORIAN MEDIA GROUP
Dorian Media Group is a creative AI agency and production company that unifies brand strategy, premium content, website design, and AI powered marketing into one cohesive system built to grow your business.
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