You’re a procurement officer with a deputy minister waiting on a recommendation and an RFP timeline that didn’t leave room for forty interview questions per shortlisted vendor. You get twenty minutes on a discovery call with each of three consultants. Which eight questions do you ask? The answer matters more than the volume of the conversation. The eighty-question template comforts the file. Eight load-bearing questions tell you which vendor can actually deliver.
This is for procurement officers, contracting authorities, and senior buyers running a public-sector WordPress engagement with real signoff exposure. The regulatory examples below are Canadian because that’s where most of my engagements run, and those are the regimes I can speak about with evidence. The questions themselves travel — every public-sector procurement regime I’ve worked alongside has a version of the same conversation, just with different statutes and different officer titles.
Why eight, and why not eighty
A long evaluation checklist is comfort. It feels procurement-grade because it covers every dimension a deputy minister might later ask about. It’s also the document that gets ignored on the actual discovery call, because nobody can answer eighty questions in twenty minutes and most of them aren’t load-bearing anyway. The conversation that produces a defensible vendor choice is not the same conversation that produces a thick file.
Eight questions, chosen carefully, cover the capability dimensions that actually predict whether a WordPress vendor can deliver in a Canadian public-sector context — architecture, accessibility, governance, training, hosting, data residency, ongoing support, and procurement readiness. Each one is designed so the answer to it can’t be substituted for the answer to another. If a vendor gives the same answer to questions two and four, that’s the signal — not the content of either answer.
I’ve sat in the room on both sides of these conversations. I’ve been the vendor evaluated through an eighty-question template that missed the load-bearing eight. I’ve also advised procurement officers on which eight to ask, and watched the same shortlist of vendors produce very different recommendations depending on which questions made the cut. The eight below are the ones that have separated vendors who actually deliver for federal departments, provincial agencies, school boards, and municipal teams from vendors who have a sales deck claiming they could.
Eight questions to ask a WordPress vendor
- What is your reference engagement at our buyer profile? Not “federal departments” or “school boards.” A specific department, a specific contract band, a named scope, and a contact procurement can call. Vendors who can’t name one haven’t delivered at your profile yet — that may still be acceptable, but only if the engagement is structured for it.
- How do you certify accessibility on delivery? The useful answers reference a named standard (WCAG 2.2 AA, AODA, the Accessible Canada Act regulations), name the tools (axe, WAVE, manual keyboard audit, screen-reader walkthrough on NVDA), and describe the signoff document the vendor produces. “We follow WCAG” is a starting point, not an answer.
- What is your editorial-workflow default? Roles, capabilities, who can publish without review, who reviews, how scheduled posts behave, how the comms team recovers from a bad publish. The Publishing Teams piece covers what a real editorial workflow looks like in WordPress.
- How do you handle data residency? Hosting provider, region, where backups live, where staging data lives, where logs are retained, what happens to personal data in form submissions. The Treasury Board cloud-usage profile and Schedule III of the Privacy Act don’t get answered with “we use Amazon Web Services.”
- What is your training model for staff turnover? Public-sector teams turn over more than vendors expect. The useful answer includes a recorded library, a written operator reference, and a re-training trigger (new comms hire, new accessibility officer, ministry restructure). Training that doesn’t survive turnover is a year-three problem.
- What does ongoing support cost? A monthly retainer band, a response service-level agreement, what’s in scope and what isn’t, and the upgrade path when the work outgrows the retainer. A vendor who can’t price ongoing support on the call hasn’t run support before, or is hoping you won’t notice.
- How do you respond to procurement-evidence requests? Insurance certificates, security questionnaires, accessibility statements, performance test reports — the paperwork procurement needs in the file. Mature vendors have these ready and can email them within a business day. Less mature vendors treat each request as a fresh project.
- What will you refuse to do? The question most agencies don’t get asked, and the one that tells you the most. A vendor that will do anything is selling a deck, not a practice. The honest refusals reveal what the vendor knows about its own limits.
What a strong answer sounds like
What you’re listening for is specificity — names of actual departments, specific dollar bands, real timelines, real tools. Evidence the vendor can pull from a filing cabinet rather than recall from a sales deck. And answers that differ across the eight questions, because if they all sound like paraphrases of the same paragraph, you’re hearing the deck, not the practice.
A strong answer to question two might be: “we run axe-core against every release, manual keyboard audit against the editorial workflow, and ship a signed accessibility statement against AODA section 14 — here’s a redacted sample from a recent municipal delivery.” A strong answer to question seven might be: “we have a security questionnaire response on file that we can adapt within four business hours, and the latest version is attached to this email.” A strong answer to question eight is a specific refusal — “I won’t deliver a WordPress site without an editorial-workflow signoff from the comms lead” — rather than “we’re flexible about scope.”
The pattern shows up across all eight questions. A strong answer means the vendor can reach into a filing cabinet (literal or otherwise) and pull out the evidence. A less-developed answer describes what the vendor would produce if you asked them to.
What it sounds like when a vendor isn’t ready yet
There’s a pattern that shows up when a vendor hasn’t yet built a practice around your specific buyer profile. Reference engagements get described in general terms (“many federal departments,” “several school boards”) rather than named. Accessibility comes back as a category rather than a process — something like “we follow industry standards” instead of a tool and a signoff document. Pricing arrives as a hedge (“it depends on scope”) rather than a band. Procurement evidence comes with “we can put that together” instead of “here it is.” Refusal questions get answered with “we work with whatever the client needs.”
None of those answers automatically rules a vendor out. Some of them just mean the vendor hasn’t done a delivery at your profile yet, and that may be acceptable for a smaller engagement where the file can absorb some risk. The contract has to acknowledge what the answers mean, though. The right shape is reduced scope, a senior-oversight reviewer named in the proposal, and a procurement officer who has signed off on the risk in writing. The wrong shape is a full-scope engagement that pretends the hedges weren’t hedges — that’s the engagement that lands back on the procurement officer’s desk a year later.
Eight questions versus the eighty-question RFP
Hiring a vendor through a discovery call is closer to hiring a contractor for a renovation than it is to writing a thesis. You don’t ask the contractor eighty questions before letting them quote — you ask the few that tell you whether they’ll actually show up, whether they’ve done a job like yours, whether they’ll leave the site tidy, and whether they’ll be honest when something goes wrong. The eighty-question version produces a binder. The eight-question version produces a contractor.
The helpful-neighbour test applies here the same way it applies to tools and trades. A neighbour who answers your questions plainly, names their limits, and points you somewhere better when they aren’t the right hire is the neighbour you keep calling. A neighbour who has the same answer to every question and pivots every conversation back to a sales close isn’t a neighbour at all — they’re a salesperson with a yard.
What it costs when the wrong questions get asked
The cost of the call itself is twenty minutes per shortlisted vendor. The cost of skipping it — or of running it as a checklist exercise that misses the load-bearing questions — is whatever the wrong proposal turns into on contact with the actual project. The bands current clients tell me about run from eighty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars in re-tender, rebuild, or fixing what shouldn’t have been delivered in the first place. Those numbers aren’t theoretical; they’re what shows up in the briefing note when the file comes back for review.
For the underlying cost math — and for the in-house developer alternative every procurement officer needs to weigh against the consultant route — the cost comparison piece walks the numbers.
How the eight fit Canadian public-sector procurement
The procurement framework these eight questions sit inside, in Canada, is the Canadian Free Trade Agreement Chapter 504 at the federal level — together with the Treasury Board Directive on Service and Digital, the Accessible Canada Act, and the relevant departmental procurement instruments. Provincially, the broader-public-sector directives in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces set their own thresholds and evidence requirements. Each regime decides what shape of engagement is even available at a given dollar band; the eight questions decide whether the procured engagement actually delivers.
Three of the eight questions tie directly to standing Canadian-specific obligations, and each has a companion piece in this practice:
- Question two intersects with AODA in Ontario and the Accessible Canada Act federally — the AODA audit a federal vendor actually asks for goes deeper.
- Question four ties to the Treasury Board cloud-usage profile and Schedule III privacy obligations — Canadian data residency for WordPress hosts covers what each major host actually delivers.
- Question seven sits on top of departmental procurement-evidence retention, and the 2026 site audit checklist shows what evidence procurement should expect a vendor to produce on request.
The principles travel outside Canada. The thresholds change, the documents have different names, the offices have different titles. The questions are the same.
Last reviewed May 12, 2026.
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