Web DesignHiring

What to Ask Before Hiring a Web Design Agency in New Zealand

Kage Works7 August 20268 min read

Most hiring advice assumes consumer law will catch you if a website build goes wrong. Businesses buying a website in New Zealand get very little of that protection. Consumer Protection's guidance for businesses is blunt about it: you can rely on the Consumer Guarantees Act only for products and services of a kind ordinarily bought for personal, domestic or household use, and even then, two businesses can agree in writing that the Act doesn't apply (Consumer Protection). A custom website built for your business fails the first test and most agency terms handle the second.

So the written agreement carries the whole load. These are the questions that change what ends up in it, ordered by how much they cost you if you skip them.

Your contract replaces consumer law, so read the exclusion clause

Section 43 of the Consumer Guarantees Act allows a supplier and a business customer to contract out, provided both are in trade, the agreement is in writing, and the exclusion is fair and reasonable (Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, s 43). Most agency terms include that clause, alongside one for the Contract and Commercial Law Act.

Seeing it there should not put you off, since it's standard practice between businesses. The consequence is what matters. Once those Acts are switched off, the only standard your work gets measured against is the one written in your scope document. A promise made in the sales meeting about page speed or a second round of design carries no weight if it didn't make the file you signed.

Ask for the scope document and the terms as two separate attachments, then check that every commitment you remember hearing appears in one of them. Anything missing goes in an email before you sign, with a reply confirming it.

Copyright ownership defaults are about to flip

New Zealand is unusual here. Under section 21(3) of the Copyright Act 1994, if you commission and pay for a computer program, photograph, or film, you are the first owner of the copyright, subject to any agreement saying otherwise. The same applies to drawings, diagrams, plans, and several other categories of artistic work listed in the section (Copyright Act 1994, s 21). That commissioning rule covers a lot of a website build.

It leaves out literary works. The words on your pages, written by the agency's copywriter, sit outside the rule unless they form part of a computer program. Buying the build doesn't hand you the copy by default.

The rule is also on its way out. In 2026 the Government confirmed a package of Copyright Act changes that includes reversing this default, so creators would own commissioned works unless the parties agree otherwise (MBIE). Nothing has been enacted yet, and the related free trade agreement obligations run to 2028, so a build starting today still falls under the current rule. A build starting after the amendment passes won't.

That makes the default worthless as a plan. Ask for a written assignment of copyright covering everything produced for you, including the copy and photography, taking effect on final payment. Then ask a follow-up most people skip: which parts of my site are licensed rather than owned? Stock photography, premium fonts, and paid plugins often come with a licence held by the agency. Find out now whether those licences transfer to you, or whether you'll be re-buying them the day you move on.

Check whose name goes on the domain

The registrant is the entity that holds a .nz domain and controls it. Changing the registrant needs the current registrant's authorisation, and the registrar has to be satisfied that authorisation is real before processing it (Domain Name Commission).

Read that as a hostage situation waiting to happen. If your agency registers yourbusiness.co.nz under its own company name, recovering it later depends on that agency still existing and still feeling cooperative. The alternative is a complaint to the .nz Dispute Resolution Service, which is a slow way to get back something you paid for.

One sentence fixes it: my company will be the registrant on the domain, in our name, with our contact details. Apply the same question to the hosting account, the DNS records, the analytics property, and any advertising accounts. Agencies with clean handover practices answer this in seconds because it's how they already work.

Ask for a site they launched a year ago, then check the field data

Portfolio screenshots prove somebody can use Figma. Ask instead for the live URL of a site they launched at least twelve months ago, then run it through PageSpeed Insights yourself before the next meeting.

Ignore the big lab score at the top. Look at the field data section, which comes from real Chrome users rather than a simulated test. Google's thresholds for a good experience are an LCP within 2.5 seconds, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and a CLS of 0.1 or less, each measured at the 75th percentile of page views (web.dev). A site showing no field data at all is below the traffic threshold for the Chrome UX Report, which tells you something about how the project went after launch.

One failing site proves little, since a client can add a heavy tracking script six months later and wreck it. Three failing sites, chosen by the agency as its own best work, is a pattern. Follow up by asking what they'd fix on the worst one. Answers that name render-blocking scripts or oversized hero images come from someone who has done the work. "We'd optimise it" comes from someone who hasn't.

Get a fixed scope, and ask what counts as a change

Ask what happens when you request something that isn't in the scope document. The useful answer describes a process: a written change request, a price, and your sign-off before work starts. "We're pretty flexible" means the flexibility gets billed later, or the project stalls while both sides avoid raising it.

Two more questions belong in the same conversation. Pin down the number of design revisions included and the point at which round four becomes chargeable. Then settle who supplies the content, in what format, by what date. An agency that has been burned before will have a clear answer about what happens to your launch date when the copy arrives three weeks late.

Check whether the quote is GST inclusive or exclusive while you're there. At 15%, the difference on a $12,000 build is $1,800, and NZ agencies quote it both ways. Our breakdown of NZ website costs covers what sits behind those numbers in more detail.

The Disputes Tribunal now covers most NZ web builds

This change is recent enough that most hiring guides haven't caught up with it. On 24 January 2026 the Disputes Tribunal's financial jurisdiction doubled from $30,000 to $60,000, following the Disputes Tribunal Amendment Act (Ministry of Justice). Claims above $30,001 carry a filing fee of $468. Lawyers can't represent you at the hearing, and the Ministry of Justice estimated the change would improve access for about 2,000 claims a year that had been stranded between the old Tribunal limit and the cost of District Court proceedings.

Almost every small business website build in New Zealand now fits inside that limit. You have a realistic forum if a project collapses, without hiring anyone to use it.

The catch sends you back to the first question in this article. A referee decides on the evidence in front of them: the signed scope and the written trail of change requests and confirmations. A verbal promise from a meeting in March is close to unusable. Every "get it in writing" instruction above became more valuable in January, because there's now a cheap venue where the writing counts for something.

Two checks worth five minutes

Search the agency on the Companies Register by company or director name. You'll see current status, including whether a liquidator or receiver has been appointed, plus the incorporation date and the directors (Companies Register). A company incorporated four months ago presenting a decade of portfolio work may have a fair explanation, and it is a question worth asking out loud.

Then ask for a reference, with one constraint: a client whose site launched at least eighteen months ago. Recent clients are still in the honeymoon window. The useful question for an older one isn't whether they liked the design. It's how long the agency took to respond the last time they needed a small change, and what it cost.

Where to spend your scrutiny

Ownership questions come first, because they're free to settle before you sign and expensive once someone else holds your domain and your copyright. The change-request process comes second, since that's where budgets go. The field data check comes third, and it's the one that separates agencies that build fast sites from agencies that make pretty pictures of them.

An agency that answers all of these without hedging is one that has been doing this a while. Watching someone get uncomfortable around the ownership questions tells you more than any portfolio will.

If you are working through this list with us, the answers to most of it sit on our web design in Auckland page, including what a project runs, what you own at the end, and who does the work.