DEV Community: naimur rahman

Hiring a Web Development Agency? 10 Technical Things You Should Check First

naimur rahman — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 10:32:04 +0000

Building a website is relatively easy. Building a website that performs well, scales with your business, stays secure, and remains maintainable over time is a different challenge.

Whether you're launching a startup, rebuilding an existing platform, or developing a SaaS product, choosing the right web development partner can significantly influence your project's success.

Many businesses evaluate development agencies based primarily on design portfolios and pricing. However, these factors don't tell the whole story.

You also need to understand their engineering practices, technology decisions, development workflow, and approach to long-term maintenance.

Here are 10 important things to evaluate before hiring a web development agency.

1. Understand Their Technical Expertise

Start by identifying the technologies your project requires.

A modern web development project might involve:

Frontend: React, Next.js, Vue.js, or standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Backend: Node.js, Python, PHP, or other server-side technologies.
Database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, or other database systems.
CMS: WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, or headless CMS platforms.
Infrastructure: Cloud hosting, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and CDN services.

A reliable agency should explain why it recommends a particular technology instead of simply promoting its preferred stack.

The best technology is the one that fits your project's requirements, budget, and future development plans.

2. Review Their Portfolio Beyond Screenshots

A visually attractive portfolio doesn't necessarily demonstrate strong engineering capabilities.

Visit the actual websites they've developed.

Evaluate:

Mobile responsiveness.
Page loading performance.
Navigation and usability.
Accessibility.
Browser compatibility.
Overall user experience.

If possible, ask about the technical challenges involved in previous projects.

A good development partner should be able to explain what they built, why they made specific technical decisions, and how those decisions benefited the client.

3. Ask About Website Performance

Performance affects user experience, conversions, and search visibility.

Ask how the development team approaches:

Core Web Vitals.
Image optimization.
JavaScript bundle optimization.
Browser caching.
Server response times.
Lazy loading.
CDN configuration.

Google's Core Web Vitals provide useful metrics for evaluating real-world user experience.

A development agency should consider performance throughout the development process rather than treating it as a final optimization task.

4. Evaluate Their SEO-Friendly Development Practices

Technical SEO should be considered before a website goes live.

Important development considerations include:

Search-engine-friendly URL structures.
Proper heading hierarchy.
Metadata implementation.
XML sitemaps.
Robots.txt configuration.
Canonical tags.
Structured data.
Mobile usability.
Redirect management.

Website migrations require additional attention.

Changing URLs without implementing proper redirects can cause unnecessary organic traffic losses.

Make sure your development partner understands how technical decisions affect search engine crawling and indexing.

5. Understand Their Security Practices

Security should never be an afterthought.

Depending on your project, ask about:

HTTPS and SSL configuration.
Secure authentication.
Role-based access control.
Input validation.
Database security.
API authentication.
Dependency updates.
Regular backups.
Security monitoring.

For applications that process customer information or payments, security requirements become even more important.

Ask how the team identifies vulnerabilities and handles security updates after launch.

6. Check Their Development Workflow

A professional development process should be transparent.

Look for a workflow that includes:

Requirements gathering.
Technical planning.
UI/UX design.
Development.
Code review.
Testing and quality assurance.
Deployment.
Post-launch monitoring.

Ask whether they use Git, staging environments, task management tools, and regular progress demonstrations.

You should have visibility into the project's progress without needing to chase developers for updates.

7. Confirm Code Ownership and Documentation

This is one of the most overlooked aspects of outsourcing web development.

Before signing an agreement, clarify:

Who owns the source code?
Who controls the hosting account?
Who owns the domain?
Will you receive access to repositories?
Is technical documentation included?
Can another development team maintain the project?

Avoid unnecessary vendor lock-in.

Your business should not become dependent on a single agency simply because nobody else can access or understand the codebase.

Make ownership and intellectual property terms explicit in the contract.

8. Evaluate Scalability and Maintainability

A website that works for 100 visitors might struggle when traffic increases significantly.

Your development partner should consider future requirements such as:

Increased traffic.
Additional features.
Third-party integrations.
New user roles.
Multi-language functionality.
Database growth.
API expansion.

Scalability doesn't mean overengineering everything from day one.

It means making sensible architectural decisions that allow the product to evolve without unnecessary redevelopment.

9. Understand Pricing and Project Scope

Don't compare development proposals based only on their final price.

Compare what each proposal actually includes.

Consider:

Design and development scope.
Number of pages and features.
Third-party integrations.
Testing and QA.
Content migration.
SEO implementation.
Deployment.
Training and documentation.
Post-launch support.

Also clarify how additional requirements will be priced.

A transparent proposal should explain deliverables, exclusions, payment milestones, and estimated timelines.

10. Evaluate Post-Launch Support

Launching a website is not the end of development.

Websites require ongoing attention.

Maintenance may include:

Software and dependency updates.
Security patches.
Database backups.
Uptime monitoring.
Bug fixes.
Performance improvements.
Feature enhancements.

Ask whether the agency offers ongoing maintenance and what its support agreement covers.

Freelancers vs. Development Agencies: Which Should You Choose?

Both options can work, depending on your requirements.

Freelancers are often suitable for smaller projects with clearly defined requirements and limited complexity.

Development agencies are generally more suitable when projects require multiple specialists, ongoing support, complex integrations, or broader technical expertise.

The right choice depends on your project's scope, budget, timeline, and risk tolerance.

Final Thoughts

Choosing a web development agency is not just about finding someone who can write code.

You need a partner who understands your business objectives, makes sound technical decisions, communicates clearly, and considers what happens after launch.

Before making a decision, evaluate technical expertise, performance practices, security, SEO capabilities, code ownership, and long-term support.

A well-developed website should be more than an online presence. It should be a reliable digital asset that supports your business as it grows.

Want a more detailed hiring checklist?

Saesoft has published a comprehensive guide covering agency selection, services, pricing, development processes, and common hiring mistakes.

Read the full guide: https://saesoft.dev/blog/website-development-company

Website Maintenance Is More Than Updating Dependencies

naimur rahman — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:23:52 +0000

A website can appear perfectly healthy while important problems remain hidden.

A contact form may display a success message without delivering the inquiry. Backups may exist but have never been tested. A performance optimization may improve a benchmark while breaking an important customer workflow.

These are some of the reasons website maintenance needs a more systematic approach.

What should a maintenance process cover?

Here are six areas worth including in a practical maintenance plan:

Security: Keep software updated, review access permissions, and establish a process for urgent vulnerabilities.
Backups and recovery: Define backup coverage, retention, protection, and restoration procedures. Test recovery rather than assuming backups will work.
Performance: Measure representative pages, investigate bottlenecks, and verify that optimizations don't break functionality.
Functional testing: Test complete workflows, including inquiry delivery, bookings, and checkout where applicable.
Accessibility: Review keyboard navigation, form labels, visible focus, and text alternatives.
Operational accountability: Define ownership, escalation routes, support expectations, and reporting.

Start with customer journeys

Instead of beginning with a checklist of tools, identify what visitors need to accomplish.

For a service business, that might mean finding a service and submitting an inquiry. For an online store, it might mean completing checkout and receiving an order confirmation.

Then build maintenance and testing procedures around those workflows.

A broken inquiry form may be more urgent than a minor visual issue, even when the latter is easier to spot.

A practical question

When was the last time you tested your website's backup restoration process or verified that an important form actually delivered its submission?

We discuss maintenance planning, provider selection, recovery, performance, and business accountability in our full guide:

Read the article: https://saesoft.dev/blog/website-maintenance-services

What do you consider the most overlooked part of website maintenance?

Website Performance Monitoring: Metrics, Tools, and Best Practices

naimur rahman — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:03:59 +0000

Website performance monitoring is an important part of maintaining a reliable web application. A website may appear to work normally while experiencing slow response times, intermittent downtime, or performance problems that affect users.

In this guide, we'll look at what to monitor, which metrics matter, and how to build a practical monitoring workflow.

What Is Website Performance Monitoring?

Website performance monitoring is the process of continuously measuring a website's speed, availability, responsiveness, and overall reliability.

It helps developers detect problems, investigate performance regressions, and understand how their applications behave over time.

Key Metrics to Monitor

1. Page loading performance

Track how quickly users can see and interact with your content. Core Web Vitals are useful indicators of real-world user experience:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Measures loading performance.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Measures responsiveness.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Measures visual stability.

2. Uptime and availability

Check whether your website and critical endpoints are accessible. Availability checks can help you identify outages and receive alerts when a service becomes unavailable.

3. Server response time

Monitor how long your server takes to respond to requests. Sudden increases can indicate database bottlenecks, overloaded infrastructure, or slow application code.

4. Error rates

Track HTTP errors, failed requests, and application exceptions. Error monitoring helps you investigate issues before they become widespread.

Tools for Website Performance Monitoring

Choose tools based on the problems you need to detect:

Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyze page performance and Core Web Vitals.
Google Search Console: Review Core Web Vitals data for eligible pages across your site.
Uptime monitoring services: Detect outages and availability issues.
Application performance monitoring (APM): Investigate slow requests, database queries, and application bottlenecks.

No single tool covers every aspect of performance. Combining complementary tools gives you a more complete picture.

A Practical Monitoring Workflow

Establish a baseline for loading performance and server response time.
Monitor uptime and important user-facing endpoints.
Configure alerts for outages and significant performance changes.
Investigate the root cause instead of treating symptoms.
Test fixes and compare results against your baseline.
Review trends regularly to identify recurring issues.

Avoid setting arbitrary alert thresholds without considering your application's normal traffic and performance requirements.

Final Thoughts

Website performance monitoring helps developers maintain fast, available, and reliable applications. Start with a few meaningful metrics, configure actionable alerts, and expand your monitoring as your application grows.

For a complementary overview, read the original guide on Saesoft:

https://saesoft.dev/blog/website-performance-monitoring

How to Automate Business Processes: A 10-Step Guide

naimur rahman — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:22:38 +0000

Most teams lose hours every week to work software could do: copying data between systems, sending the same emails, updating spreadsheets. Here is the short version of how to automate those processes without building something fragile.

What makes a good candidate

Look for work that is frequent, rule-based, structured, and costly when done wrong. Lead capture, invoice reminders, onboarding tasks, and recurring reports usually qualify. Tasks that need nuanced judgment on every case usually don't.

The 10 steps

Document the current process. Write down the trigger, inputs, systems, decisions, actions, and what "done" means.
Remove unnecessary steps first. Don't automate a messy process exactly as it is.
Define a precise trigger. Not "when something changes" but "when an order moves from PENDING to PAID".
Write the business rules explicitly. Keep them in one place, not scattered across scripts.
Decide what stays human. Approvals, unusual cases, sensitive data, and important customer messages need review.
Choose the simplest approach that works. Linear workflows suit no-code tools; complex rules, high volume, or strict security may need custom code.
Design for failure. Use idempotent processing (a duplicate webhook shouldn't create a duplicate order), limited retries, validation, and alerts, so nothing fails silently.
Test beyond the happy path. Invalid input, duplicates, an unavailable API, timeouts.
Launch gradually. Automate data collection first, keep final actions manual, then expand.
Monitor and improve. APIs and processes change, so review important workflows regularly.

A real example: routing quote and contact requests

We run this on our own site with Make and HubSpot:

A custom webhook receives each submission.
A router sends quote requests down one route and general contact messages down another.
On each route, HubSpot's "Create or Update a Contact" action saves the person, so repeat submitters update an existing record instead of creating a duplicate.
An email action sends the follow-up for that route.

The contact is saved before the email goes out, so a failing email provider doesn't lose the inquiry. The weak spot is that a submission matching neither filter is dropped. A fallback route and an error handler fix that.

No-code or custom?

Use a platform like Zapier, Make, or n8n for simple, linear workflows with common apps. Choose custom development when you need complex validation, high volume, strict data control, or advanced error handling. The two can also work together.

Where AI fits

AI helps with unstructured input, like extracting data from documents or categorizing messages. For deterministic rules, plain logic is more predictable than asking a model.

The full guide, with an ROI formula, a tools comparison, an FAQ, and an automation readiness calculator, is here: How to Automate Business Processes.