What a website quote
should include

You, always. The domain is registered in your company's name, with your contact email and in an account you control, even if the agency buys it and manages it day to day. If the domain is in the agency's name, technically they own your brand on the internet, not you: they can refuse to transfer it, charge you to do so, or simply take weeks if the relationship ends badly. Ask to be shown it before signing: log in to the registrar's panel and check the «Registrant» field. If it shows the agency's name, ask for it to be changed now, while relations are good, not when you really need it.

It depends on what was signed, which is why you have to ask for it in writing before starting. Without that clause, some agencies take the view that the logins are theirs because they created them, and lock you out of your own website until you renew the maintenance contract. It's the most common way of tying a client in without telling them. Ask for the quote to state that you'll receive an admin user for the CMS, access to the hosting or control panel, and FTP or database credentials if applicable, handed over when the project ends and not conditional on any later contract. If they refuse or dodge the question, it's the clearest sign that provider isn't the right one.

Not always, and when it is, almost never indefinitely. It's common for the first year of hosting to be included in the project price and billed separately from the second year onwards, with a fee the quote should state from the outset, not announce as a surprise twelve months later. What you need to ask isn't just whether it's included, but for how long, what happens if you don't renew with the same company (whether you can move the site to another host at no cost and without obstacles) and whether that hosting is shared with other clients or a space dedicated to your project. Without those three answers in writing, «hosting included» means nothing.

The number matters least if what a page is hasn't been defined. A quote that just says «up to 8 pages» leaves open the argument over whether the legal notice counts, whether a campaign landing page counts, or whether ten product pages are one page or ten. What prevents the argument is a closed, named list: home, services, about us, contact, with the legal pages separate because they're almost never counted as content pages. If later on you need a landing page for a promotion or a new service page, that's a separate job with its own price, not a free extension of the original scope.

That has to be decided before starting, because it's the task that delays a project most when nobody has been assigned it. If you write the copy, the quote should set a delivery date, because development can't lay out content that doesn't exist. If the agency writes it, you need to be clear how many rounds of copy revisions are included and whether the price covers SEO copywriting or just basic writing, which are different services with different effort. The same goes for photos: if you supply them, in what format and resolution; if the agency does, whether they're the business's own photography or stock images, and who pays the licence if they're paid for.

Maintenance covers keeping the website working as it was delivered: security updates, backups, fixing something that breaks on its own, or changing a single piece of text or photo within what's already built. A new job is anything that didn't exist: a new section, a different feature, a redesign of a page, integrating a tool that wasn't in the original scope. The line blurs in practice («change a piece of text» can turn into «redo the section»), so the quote should set a reasonable limit, for example minutes or hours a month included in maintenance, with anything beyond that quoted separately before it's done, not billed afterwards as a surprise.