What if I genuinely do not know who my customer is?

Then look backwards instead of forwards. List your last ten jobs, mark the five you would happily repeat, and describe what those five have in common. That description is your answer, and it is more reliable than any persona exercise.

Do I need professional photos before we start?

No. Real phone photos of actual work beat stock photography and often beat a staged shoot. Book a photographer later, once you know which pages exist and what they need.

I do not own my domain — the previous agency registered it. What now?

Deal with it before anything else. Transfers take days and occasionally involve a reluctant former supplier. Discovering this on launch day is the worst version of the same conversation.

Should I write the text myself or pay for it?

Write the raw version yourself even if someone else polishes it. You know the objections, the vocabulary and the real reasons customers hesitate. A writer can shape that; they cannot invent it.

What to prepare before your website project starts

The four decisions, the accesses you must own, and the content list — gathered before the first meeting. An hour spent here removes the two most common causes of a project running long.

Key takeaways

Four decisions before anything else: who it is for, the one action it must produce, your price policy, and who approves.
Own your domain, hosting, analytics and Google Business Profile in your own accounts — before the project, not after it.
Rough content that exists beats perfect content that is coming.
Proof is the hardest thing to assemble later and the thing that convinces buyers most.
You do not need to prepare design opinions, a sitemap, or technology choices. That is the job you are hiring for.

What do you actually need before the project starts?

Four decisions, five accesses and one folder of content. That is the whole list, and it takes about an hour to assemble if you stop trying to make it perfect.

It matters because the two things that make website projects run long are missing content and unclear authority — both of which are settled here, before anyone is billing you by the week.

The four decisions, in order

Who is this for? Not "everyone". One sentence naming the customer you actually want more of. Every later argument about wording gets resolved by this sentence.
What is the one action the site should produce? A phone call, a form, a booking, a quote request. One. A site optimised for three actions produces none of them well.
What is your price policy? You do not have to publish a price list, but you must decide what you will say. "From X", "depends on scope, here is what moves it", or full transparency are all defensible. Silence is not — it is the most common reason an enquiry never arrives.
Who approves? One name. Others advise.

The accesses you must own

Not "have access to" — own, in accounts registered to you. This is the part people skip and regret years later, usually at the worst moment.

Domain. Registered to your company, in an account you can log into today. Check this now, not at launch.
Hosting or the platform account.
Google Business Profile, verified and under your own Google account.
Analytics, created under your account with the agency added as a user — never the reverse.
The email address the forms will deliver to, and confirmation that someone reads it.

The test is simple: if you and your agency parted ways tomorrow on bad terms, would you still control all five? If the answer is no anywhere, fix that first.

The content list — the honest version

Gather what you have, in whatever state it is in. A folder of imperfect material is worth more than a promise of polished material.

What you do, in your own words, as if explaining to a neighbour. Voice notes are fine.
Three to five real jobs you are proud of: what the problem was, what you did, how it ended.
Photos of real work, real premises, real people. Phone photos of actual jobs beat stock photography every time, and buyers can tell the difference instantly.
Your standard answers to the questions customers always ask. These become the FAQ, and they are the passages that search engines and AI assistants quote.
Certifications, insurance, memberships, guarantees — anything that reduces the perceived risk of hiring you.

Proof: the part that is hard to assemble later

Reviews, named references and before-and-after evidence are the difference between a site that describes a business and one that convinces a stranger. They are also the slowest thing to gather, because they depend on other people replying.

Start this before the project, not during it. Ask three past customers for a sentence each, and ask permission to use their name — an anonymous testimonial persuades almost nobody, and is easy to suspect of being invented.

What you do not need to prepare

Worth saying, because people delay projects for months assembling things nobody needs.

A sitemap or page structure. That follows from the four decisions.
Design references. Bring them if you have them, but "sites I like" is the least reliable brief there is.
Technology choices. If you are choosing the framework, you are doing the job you are paying for.
Finished, polished copy. Raw and true is easier to work with than polished and vague.

The one-hour version

If you do nothing else: write the four decisions in a single document, confirm you can log into the domain, put twenty real photos in a folder, and message three past customers asking for a sentence.

That hour is the difference between a project that finishes in two weeks and one that drifts — the timeline mechanics are in how long it takes to build a website.