How to write a website brief.

Why the brief matters more than anything else you'll write

Every bad website project I've ever been called in to rescue traces back to the same root cause: nobody wrote down what the site was for. Not the design, not the platform, not the developer's skill — the absence of an agreed definition of success. Without it, everyone involved makes reasonable decisions towards different destinations.

A brief does four things that nothing else does. It forces you to decide what the site is for before anyone spends money finding out. It makes quotes comparable — three designers quoting on the same document produce prices you can actually weigh against each other, rather than three different projects at three different prices. It becomes the reference point when scope drifts, which it always does. And it exposes disagreement inside your own business while disagreement is still free: the number of times a director and a marketing manager have discovered mid-build that they wanted opposite things is remarkable.

What a brief is — and what it isn't

People conflate three documents that do different jobs. Getting them straight saves a lot of confusion:

The critical point: a brief describes the problem, not the solution. You are not expected to specify the CMS, the hosting stack or the page templates. If you do specify those things without needing to, you narrow the field of ideas you'll get back — and you may lock yourself into decisions that cost you later. Say "customers must be able to book a slot without phoning us"; don't say "we need a WordPress plugin for bookings". The first invites expertise. The second buys a plugin.

The twelve sections of a complete website brief

This is the structure I'd want to receive, in the order I'd want to read it. The brief builder tool walks through exactly these and produces a formatted document at the end.

Section by section: how to write each part well

1. Business context

Assume the reader knows nothing about your trade. One paragraph: what you sell, to whom, where, and what makes you different from the firm down the road. If you're an Essex trade covering three towns, say which three — that single sentence changes the entire local SEO approach. Include company age and size; a twenty-year-old family firm and a six-month-old startup need different sites even in the same industry.

2. Goals and success metrics

This is the section that separates a useful brief from a wish list. "A modern website" is not a goal. "Twenty qualified enquiries a month, up from six" is. Rank your goals — if everything is a priority, nothing is.

Good goals look like: generate enquiries for commercial work specifically, not domestic; let customers book without phoning; stop losing quotes to competitors who look more established; rank for "emergency plumber Basildon"; reduce the time we spend answering the same five questions. Each of those changes what gets built.

Then state how you'll know it worked. Enquiry volume, phone calls, quote requests, average job value, rankings for named searches. If you can't measure it, the project can never be judged a success — which conveniently means nobody can be held to anything.

3. Audience

Describe the people who actually pay you. Not demographics for their own sake — decision behaviour. What triggers the search? What are they anxious about? What do they need to see to trust you? A homeowner choosing an electrician after a scare wants credentials, insurance and availability, visible in seconds. A facilities manager procuring a maintenance contract wants case studies, compliance and a phone number that reaches a human.

If you serve two very different audiences — domestic and commercial, say — write both, and say which matters more. That decision drives the entire homepage.

4. Competitors

Three to five links, each with one line on what you think. "Their site loads fast and looks established — that's the impression I want" is useful. "I hate the colour" is not. Also name who you lose work to and why you think that happens; it's often the most valuable sentence in the whole brief.

Run their sites through a free health checker before you write this section — knowing that your main rival scores 41 out of 100 tells you something about how winnable the market is.

5. Problems with the current site

If you have a site, be blunt. Can't update it. Looks dated on phones. Nobody can find it. Enquiries dried up. The developer vanished. Each of those points at a different fix, and the honest list is what lets a designer tell you whether you need a rebuild or just repairs. If you don't know what's wrong, run the health check and paste the findings in — a score and a fault list is a perfectly good problem statement.

6. Scope: pages and features

List the pages you think you need and the things the site must do. Don't agonise — a designer will refine it, and our guide on what pages a website should have covers the sensible baseline. What matters is flagging the functional requirements early, because they drive cost more than page count: online payments, bookings, member logins, quote calculators, stock, multi-language, integrations with your existing systems.

7. Content: the section everyone underestimates

More website projects stall on content than on anything technical. State plainly what you have (existing copy, photos, logo files), what needs creating, and who is writing it. If the answer is "you, in the evenings, around a full-time job", say so — that's a genuine project risk and a good designer will plan around it or offer copywriting.

Photography deserves its own line. Real photos of your work, your team and your vans outperform stock imagery so consistently that it's barely worth debating — and if you don't have any, budgeting a day's photography is usually a better investment than an extra page.

8. Design direction

Link three sites you like — any industry — and say why in one line each. "Clean, lots of white space, easy to read" tells a designer more than a mood board. Include what you dislike too. State what brand assets exist: logo files (vector, ideally — see logo design if you only have a blurry JPG), colours, fonts, brand guidelines. If none of that exists, say so and treat it as part of the project.

9. SEO and AI visibility

This is where 2026 briefs differ from 2020 briefs, and where most templates you'll find online are out of date. Cover three things:

• What you want to be found for. List the actual searches — "commercial electrician Chelmsford", not "SEO". Include the ones you're losing today.
• Local visibility. Which towns, and whether your Google Business Profile is set up and tended. For most local businesses this outranks everything else in the brief in commercial value — see what local SEO actually involves.
• AI search readiness. A growing share of customers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Google's AI Overviews before they ever see a list of blue links. Being citable by those systems depends on things a designer controls: structured data, clear factual answers on the page, consistent business information, and a site that's actually crawlable. Ask for it explicitly — most briefs still don't, and most quotes therefore don't include it.

Also state whether you have Search Console and analytics access, and whether the site currently ranks for anything worth protecting. If it does, migration care becomes a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

10. Technical requirements and ownership

You don't need to specify the stack, but you do need to state the constraints and — critically — the ownership position:

• Who owns the domain, and do you have access to it? (Astonishingly often, the answer is "our last developer".)
• Where is it hosted now, and are you tied in?
• What must it connect to — accounting software, CRM, booking system, stock, mailing list?
• Do you need to edit content yourself, or would you rather message someone and have it done?
• What happens if you and the supplier part ways — do you keep the site?

That last question belongs in every brief. Ask it explicitly and watch how differently suppliers answer it.

11. Budget: say the number

The most common question I'm asked about briefs is whether to reveal the budget, on the theory that quotes will magically rise to meet it. Here's the honest counter-argument: a budget isn't a price, it's a constraint that determines what's possible. Without it, you'll receive proposals for projects you can't afford and proposals that skip things you needed, and you'll waste weeks discovering which is which.

State a real range and what it covers. If you genuinely don't know what's realistic, the UK market in 2026 looks roughly like this:

Also state whether the budget includes ongoing costs. A £4,000 build with £150/month of hosting, plugins and change requests behind it is a different proposition to an all-inclusive plan — our cost breakdown and calculator unpick that properly.

12. Timeline

Give a date and the reason behind it. "Before our trade show in October" is actionable; "ASAP" is noise. Be honest about your own availability, because client review time is the single biggest cause of overrun — a two-week build genuinely can take three months if feedback takes a fortnight each round. Typical honest timelines run three to six weeks for a small bespoke site and two to four months for something larger, as covered in how long a website takes to build.

What designers actually read first (and what they're looking for)

Since you're writing this document for people like me, here's what happens when it lands. I read the goals section first, then the budget, then the scope — in that order — because those three together tell me whether the project is realistic and whether I'm the right person for it. Then I read the competitors and the current-site problems, because that's where the actual work usually hides.

What makes me want to quote: specific goals, a stated budget, an honest account of what's gone wrong before, and evidence that someone internally has decision-making authority. What makes me nervous: no budget, twelve equally-weighted priorities, "we'll know it when we see it", and a brief written by committee where two sections contradict each other.

And what makes me quote high — this is worth knowing — is uncertainty. Vagueness gets priced as risk. Every ambiguity you resolve in the brief comes back to you as a lower, more accurate number.

Common mistakes that cost you money

Briefing a redesign vs briefing a new build

If you already have a website, your brief needs three extra sections and one deletion. Add: what's working today (pages that rank, content that converts — these must survive the move), what's ranking (export your top queries from Search Console; losing them is the main risk of any rebuild), and what must be migrated (blog archives, product data, customer accounts, historical URLs). Delete the temptation to start from a blank page — you're carrying earned value, and preserving it is a requirement, not an optimisation.

Say explicitly: rankings and existing URLs must be preserved via redirects. It's the single line that separates a safe redesign from an expensive lesson, and it's covered in detail in the redesign guide.

After you send it: running a fair comparison

Send the same brief to three suppliers — no more, or you'll drown. Give them a deadline and offer a fifteen-minute call, because the questions they ask you are diagnostic: good suppliers push back on your goals, query the budget against the scope, and ask about content ownership. Suppliers who ask nothing and quote immediately are quoting a template.

When proposals return, compare them on: what's actually included (hosting? updates? SEO? photography?), who does the work, what happens after launch, what changes cost, and who owns what. Price alone is meaningless until those are equalised — which is exactly what our guide to choosing a web designer is built to help you do, with five verification tests you can run in five minutes.

The template and the tool

Two ways to produce yours. The Website Brief Builder walks you through all twelve sections with prompts and examples, then generates a clean, formatted brief you can copy, download or email to any designer — free, no sign-up, nothing stored on our servers. Or work through the twelve headings above in a document of your own; the structure matters more than the tool.

Either way, send it to whoever you like. A brief written for one supplier is a brief written badly — the whole point is that it travels.

Frequently asked questions

What is a website brief?

A short document — usually two to four pages — that tells prospective designers what your business does, who it serves, what the new website must achieve, what it must contain, and what you can spend. It describes the business problem rather than the technical solution, so different suppliers can quote on the same thing.

How long should a website brief be?

Two to four pages for most small and medium businesses. Long enough to cover the twelve core sections, short enough that busy designers actually read it. Detailed technical definitions belong in the specification, which comes after you appoint someone.

Should I include my budget in a website brief?

Yes. A budget isn't a price you'll automatically be charged — it's a constraint that determines what's possible. Withholding it produces proposals you can't afford and proposals that omit what you needed, and costs you weeks working out which is which. State a realistic range and say what it must cover.

What if I don't know what my budget should be?

Use market bands as a starting point: under £500 buys DIY or a template; £500–£1,500 buys a small bespoke site or a pay-monthly plan; £1,500–£5,000 buys a larger site with an SEO campaign; £5,000–£15,000 covers custom functionality and e-commerce; £15,000+ is agency-led work. Then state the band you're in.

Do I need to know what CMS or platform I want?

No, and specifying it too early can cost you. Describe what you need to be able to do — edit pages yourself, take bookings, sell products — and let suppliers recommend the platform. If you have a genuine constraint, such as an existing system you must keep, state that as a constraint rather than a solution.

Who should write the website brief?

One person should own it, gathering input from anyone with a stake — usually the owner or marketing lead. Critically, name the person with final sign-off. Briefs written by committee tend to contain contradictory requirements that surface expensively mid-build.

What's the difference between a brief and a specification?

You write the brief; it describes the problem, the goals and the constraints. The designer writes the specification after being appointed; it defines exactly what will be built, page by page and feature by feature. The brief gets you comparable quotes; the spec gets you an accurate build.

How do I write goals for a website brief?

Make them measurable and ranked. Replace 'a modern website' with 'twenty qualified enquiries a month, up from six', 'let customers book without phoning', or 'rank for emergency plumber Basildon'. Then state how you'll measure each one, so the project can actually be judged.

Should the brief mention SEO?

Yes — and in 2026 it should mention AI visibility too. List the specific searches you want to be found for, the towns that matter, whether your Google Business Profile is set up, and ask explicitly for structured data and crawlability so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews can cite you. Most briefs still omit this, so most quotes exclude it.

What should I say about content in my brief?

State what exists, what needs creating, and who is writing it. Content is the commonest cause of stalled website projects. If you'll be writing it yourself in the evenings, say so — it's a genuine project risk and a good supplier will plan around it or offer copywriting.

How many designers should I send my brief to?

Three is the sweet spot. Fewer gives you no comparison; more creates a comparison exercise bigger than the project. Give them the same brief, the same deadline, and offer a short call — the questions they ask are as informative as the quote.

What questions should a good designer ask after reading my brief?

They should push back on vague goals, query whether the budget matches the scope, ask who's writing content, ask about existing rankings and who owns the domain, and ask what happens after launch. A supplier who asks nothing and quotes instantly is quoting a template.

Do I need a brief for a website redesign?

Yes, plus three extra sections: what's working today, what's currently ranking (export your Search Console queries), and what must be migrated. Always state explicitly that existing rankings and URLs must be preserved through redirects — it's the line that prevents the most expensive redesign mistake.

Can I use a website brief template?

Templates are a reasonable starting point, but most circulating online predate structured data and AI search and omit ownership questions entirely. Use the twelve sections in this guide, or the free brief builder, which prompts you through each one with examples.

What should I say about hosting and domains in my brief?

State who owns the domain and whether you have access to it, where the site is hosted now, whether you're tied into a contract, and what the site must integrate with. Also ask outright what happens to the site and domain if you and the supplier part company.

How detailed should the design section be?

One paragraph plus three links to sites you like, with one line each on why. That tells a designer far more than a mood board. Mention brand assets you have — vector logo, colours, fonts — or say plainly that none exist, which makes it part of the project.

What if my brief and the quotes don't match up?

That usually means the brief left something ambiguous, and each supplier resolved it differently. Ask each of them which assumptions they made, then add those answers to the brief and re-request. Ambiguity gets priced as risk, so clarifying it typically lowers quotes.

Is a website brief legally binding?

No — it's a planning and procurement document, not a contract. The contract comes later and should reference the agreed scope. That said, a clear brief is your strongest evidence of what was agreed if a dispute arises, so keep the version you sent.

Related: Brief builder tool · The discovery process · Choosing a designer · Cost calculator · What pages you need