Choosing a WordPress design company for a B2B export website is mostly a question of what you will own when the project ends, and whether the site will still be maintainable when that company is gone. Portfolios do not answer either question. This guide gives you the eight things to put in writing before you sign, the tests to run on the agency’s previous work, and the pricing structure that tells you an agency knows what it is doing. It applies whether the company is in your own country or, like ours, in China.
Start with ownership, not design
The single most expensive mistake we see when we take over an export site is discovering that the client never owned it. The domain is registered to the agency. The hosting account is in the agency’s name. The WordPress administrator login belongs to a freelancer who left. When the relationship ends, the site either disappears or becomes a hostage. Before any discussion of layouts, the contract must state that the domain, hosting account, WordPress admin role, source files and media library belong to you, and that you receive credentials at hand-over. If an agency resists that clause, the conversation is over.
Eight checks to run on any WordPress design company
1. Ask which theme and page builder they use — and why
A serious B2B agency names the stack without hesitation: a maintained theme, a mainstream builder such as Elementor or the block editor, and a short plugin list. Warning signs are a “custom framework” nobody else can edit, a plugin count above thirty, or nulled (pirated) premium plugins, which cannot receive security updates. Ask for the plugin list of a live client site; an agency that will not show it has something to hide.
2. Test a product page, not the homepage, on a phone
Google indexes the mobile version of your pages first (Google Search Central: mobile-first indexing) and measures Core Web Vitals against fixed thresholds: LCP at or under 2.5 seconds, INP at or under 200 milliseconds, CLS at or under 0.1 (web.dev). Run PageSpeed Insights on a product page from the agency’s portfolio. On one site we inherited, a 15 MB hero image in the product template failed every product page at once while the server itself was fine. The homepage looked perfect.
3. Check how they handle languages
Export sites usually need at least two languages. Each language version needs a self-referencing canonical tag and reciprocal hreflang tags, and each URL must return 200 (Google: localized versions). We broke this rule on our own research site — the English index page carried a canonical pointing to the Chinese version, so as far as Google was concerned the English page did not exist. It was fixed in September 2026. Ask the agency to open the source of a multilingual site they built and point to the tags.
4. Submit the enquiry form on a client site
Do it from your phone, then ask the agency whether the message arrived and how long it took. In September 2026 we audited a site whose form had been failing silently for twelve days: the reCAPTCHA site key was registered to a different domain, and 207 paid clicks landed on a form that could not send. No dashboard shows this. Only the test does, and an agency that has never run it on its own work is not maintaining anything.
5. Ask to see Search Console, not a ranking screenshot
Ranking screenshots are trivially faked and say nothing about product pages. The Pages report in Search Console shows whether product URLs are indexed at the same rate as blog posts. On export sites the common failure is a fully indexed blog and half the catalogue stuck at “crawled – currently not indexed”. An agency that cannot show this report for at least one client cannot demonstrate that its sites are being read by Google.
6. Look at the URL structure they ship
English pages need Latin-character slugs. We measured the alternative by accident: on one of our sites, English articles with Latin slugs were indexed 63 times over a period in which identical articles with Chinese-character slugs were indexed zero times (full write-up). A company that builds English sites for Chinese exporters and leaves encoded slugs in place has never looked at its own indexing data.
7. Demand an itemised quote
Design, development, content, images, each language, hosting, domain, and — the item most often missing — maintenance after launch. A single lump sum is not cheaper; it is a way of not telling you what is excluded. Our own quotes are written per project and are not published as a fixed price, because a five-page single-language site and a three-language site with 200 products have nothing in common except the word “website”.
8. Verify the company itself
Company name, registration date and address should match across the website, the business registry and third-party listings. Buyers checking a supplier — and increasingly AI assistants doing the same — cross-reference all three and flag the mismatch. It is the cheapest check on this list and the one most agencies fail on their own site.
What “good” looks like in one table
| Check | Pass | How to verify |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Domain, hosting, admin, files in your name, in the contract | Read the contract |
| Stack | Named theme and builder; plugin list shared; no nulled plugins | Ask for a live site’s plugin list |
| Speed | Mobile product page LCP ≤ 2.5 s | PageSpeed Insights on a product URL |
| Languages | Self canonical + reciprocal hreflang | View source |
| Enquiry path | Test message received within minutes | Submit the form yourself |
| Indexing | Product pages indexed at the blog’s rate | Search Console → Pages |
| URLs | Latin slugs on every English page | Sitemap export |
| Quote | Itemised, with post-launch maintenance | Read the quote |
Working with a China-based WordPress company
If your suppliers are in China, a China-based agency has one practical advantage: it understands how factories present products and how buyers search for them, because it deals with both sides daily. The practical questions to settle up front are payment method (international bank transfer or a cross-border platform), which country’s law governs the contract, invoicing, and working hours — our office runs on UTC+8, which overlaps the European morning and the American evening. We confirm contract and payment terms in writing before work starts and do not take full payment up front.
The language question cuts both ways. A Chinese agency writing English copy must have it edited by a native speaker, not machine-translated; you can test this by reading two paragraphs of any English site in their portfolio. Equally, if you sell into Chinese-speaking markets, ask who writes the Traditional or Simplified Chinese — the two are not interchangeable, and machine conversion between them is visible to any native reader.
Before you replace an agency, run three tests on your current site
Submit your own contact form from a phone. Open Search Console and read the indexing rate of product pages. Run PageSpeed Insights on one product page. If all three pass, the site is not the problem and a redesign will not fix your enquiry count; if one fails, fix that one thing first. Our WordPress development and web design service page describes what we build and how hand-over works, WordPress support and bug fixes covers sites we did not build, and the research behind the checks above is on tianwenseo.com.
Questions exporters ask before hiring a WordPress agency
I'm getting quotes for a B2B export website and they range from $500 to $8,000 for what sounds like the same thing. What explains the gap?
Scope, not design. Break each quote into design, development, content, images, languages, hosting, domain and post-launch maintenance. The cheapest quotes usually omit content, a second language and maintenance; those come back as extras later. Compare line by line, not by total.
I'm about to sign with a web agency for our export site. A friend signed one and later found he didn't own the website. How do I avoid that?
Put ownership in the contract: domain registered to your company, hosting account and WordPress administrator access handed to you, source files and media exportable. If the agency will not add the clause, do not sign.
We export machinery parts and want a China-based partner to build the site and run Google SEO. How do we tell whether they actually understand SEO?
Ask them to open one client’s Search Console and show the indexing rate of product pages, then run PageSpeed Insights on a product page from their portfolio. A company that can show both is worth talking to; one that only shows ranking screenshots is not.
Who wrote this and how to check it
Written by Liu Yu, founder of Henan Tianwen Network Technology Co., Ltd. (registered 3 May 2017; office: Room 1407, Building 9, 863 Software Park, Zhengzhou, China; UTC+8). The company builds and maintains WordPress export websites and runs Google SEO and Google Ads for B2B manufacturers; it currently maintains 30–40 client sites and publishes its own research on tianwenseo.com. Every figure above is either measured on a site we run or linked to its source. We do not promise rankings or a number of enquiries. Contract and payment terms are written per project and shared before any work starts; contact: WhatsApp +86 135 2681 6415.