The real reason agency website projects run over

The brief is a snapshot of the wrong moment

A fixed-scope website is priced against what you understood you needed at the start, which is exactly when you understood it least. You learn what you actually want by seeing early versions. In a fixed project, every one of those lessons becomes a change request, and change requests are where time and budget leak away.

Too many hands between you and the work

In a lot of agencies, your brief passes through an account manager, a project manager and perhaps a strategist before it reaches the developer who actually builds the site. Every handover is a chance for meaning to get lost, and every clarification takes a round trip. You feel the delay. You rarely see the cause.

The incentives point the wrong way

A fixed-price build rewards doing the minimum that meets the brief and charging for everything else. That is not villainy. It is the model. And the moment the site ships, the relationship is set up to end, or to turn into an upsell. Nobody is paid to keep improving what was built.

The part after launch that nobody quotes for

Most project quotes stop at go-live. The hosting goes to whoever is cheapest, updates happen when someone remembers, and every small change goes back to the agency as a fresh quote with its own wait. A year later the site is running out-of-date plugins, and the team has stopped asking for changes because it is too much hassle.

The overrun you notice is the build. The one you do not notice is everything after it.

What removes the problem

Most of this disappears when you stop treating your website as a one-off project and start treating it as something that is looked after all the time:

• Talk to the developer doing the work. No account manager relaying messages, and nothing lost in the handover.
• Price changes one at a time. A small, clear request is easy to price accurately, so the price holds.
• Keep the same people after launch. Hosting, updates, backups and security handled by the team that also makes the changes.
• Improve in small steps. See each change, adjust as you learn, and never let the site fall far enough behind to need rescuing.

If you do need a new site, it is still a project, but it can be a well-run one: agree what the site needs to do, fix the price and the start date, and have someone take over the day it goes live rather than walking away.

The overrun is not bad luck. It is the fixed-scope, many-handed model doing exactly what it is built to do. Change the model and most of the problem goes away.

That is how Wrev works. Every change is a request you can follow from start to finish in the Wrev app. Read why we prefer small steps to big relaunches, or book a demo and ask us how we work.