Website questionnaire template

A website questionnaire is the first draft of the project, written by the client. Done well, it hands you a sitemap, a feature list, the state of the content and a budget before anyone books a call. Done badly, it is a forty-question PDF that comes back half empty two weeks later, and you ask everything again at the kickoff.

Ask what the client can answer, keep the rest for the call

Clients know their business, their customers and their deadline. Few know whether they need a headless CMS, and asking makes them guess. Every question here is one a business owner can answer from memory. Hosting, the CMS and integrations are yours to raise on the call, once you know what the site has to do. That is why the template stops at 16 questions instead of 40.

Lead with the job, not the look

Question 5 asks what the site is for before anything about pages or style: win new leads, sell products online, show our work, or help existing customers. When the job and the pages disagree (a lead generation site with no contact page), you have your first talking point. Question 6 asks who the site is for, and its help text asks for one real customer, not a demographic: “a practice manager at a three-dentist clinic” beats “B2B, 30 to 55”.

Turn pages and features into a sitemap

Questions 7 and 8 are Multiple Choice, so ticking boxes costs the client nothing and you get a rough sitemap and a scope list in one pass. The features list covers a contact or quote form, an online store, booking requests, a newsletter signup, site search, more than one language and a member login. Keep “Something else” on both lists, and cap the features question at three selections if you want priorities rather than a wishlist.

Find out where the content stands

Content is what usually makes a web project late, and clients rarely volunteer that nothing is written. Question 11 asks plainly: written and approved, some of it exists, nothing yet, or we would like help writing it. “Nothing yet” next to a launch six weeks out is a conversation to have before you sign, and a chance to quote for copywriting.

Brand files and reference sites

The file upload question takes one PDF, PNG or JPG of up to 10 MB, enough for a brand guide or a logo export. Vector logos and fonts can follow through your usual file sharing. Question 13 asks for one site the client admires, and question 14 appears only after they paste a link, asking what they like about it. A link alone tells you little; “the way the case studies open full screen” tells you a lot.

Why budget is a slider

Plenty of clients who would never type a number will drag a handle. The template ships with a range of 2 to 60, in thousands of dollars. Move the minimum up to your real floor. The handle rests at the middle of the range but records nothing until the client moves it, and a required slider cannot be skipped. That middle is also an anchor, so pick a range whose midpoint you would be glad to hear. Prefer price bands? Swap it for Single Choice, as the client intake form template does.

Read the launch date as urgency

Most people answer the date approximately, and that still separates “before the trade show in March” from “sometime this year”. When it is close, ask what is driving it: a fixed event turns “can we add a member area?” into “yes, in phase two”.