Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Designer

We have rescued more businesses from bad websites than we can count. And every single time, the story is the same. A nice meeting, a reasonable quote, a pretty mockup, and then six months later a site that does not convert, cannot be edited, and feels like a hostage situation. The problems almost always trace back to questions that were not asked at the start. Here are the ones you need to ask.

Question One: Who Will Actually Own the Website?

You would be shocked how many businesses pay for a website and then discover, when they try to move it, that the designer technically owns the code, the domain is registered to the designer's agency, and the hosting account is in someone else's name. Your domain, your hosting, your codebase, all of it should be under your control from day one. If the designer hedges on this, walk away.

Question Two: What Platform Is It Built On, and Why?

"We build on our own custom platform" is, in 2020 and beyond, usually a red flag. It means you are locked in, future changes require their team specifically, and if they go bust, you are stranded. WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, whatever fits the brief, but it should be a mainstream platform with a large ecosystem of developers who could maintain it if you ever needed to switch providers.

Question Three: Can I Edit Content Without Paying You?

If the answer involves tickets, change requests or hourly fees for updating a phone number, run. A modern website should let you update text, images, pricing and blog posts yourself, easily, without breaking the layout. The designer's job is to build you something you can actually use, not to create a dependency.

• Editing should be self-serve: For routine content updates at minimum.
• Training should be included: An hour at handover is reasonable.
• Documentation should exist: A short guide you can refer back to in six months.

Question Four: How Will It Perform on Mobile?

"It will be responsive" is not an answer. "We design mobile-first, test on real devices, and target a Lighthouse score above eighty" is an answer. Mobile is the majority of traffic for most businesses now. A website that looks great on a designer's iMac and collapses on an iPhone SE is not a website, it is an expensive art piece.

Question Five: What About SEO?

Every designer will tell you the site will be "SEO-friendly". That phrase means nothing. Ask specifically, will you set up proper title tags and meta descriptions? Will URLs be clean? Will there be a sitemap? Will page speed be genuinely optimised? Will you migrate existing rankings if this is a rebuild? If they cannot answer those, they cannot deliver on "SEO-friendly". Our explainer on what SEO actually is will give you the vocabulary to press on this.

Question Six: What Happens When It Goes Wrong?

Websites break. Plugins conflict. Hosts go down. Email stops sending through the contact form. Ask what the support process looks like, what the response times are, what is included in the price, and what is billable. A one-page SLA is not unreasonable for anything beyond a very small build.

Question Seven: How Will You Measure Success?

If the designer's definition of success is "it looks nice and you signed it off", you have a problem. A website is a business asset. Success should be defined in terms of enquiries, bookings, sign-ups or sales, depending on your business. Otherwise, you are paying for decoration, not infrastructure.

Question Eight: Who Is Actually Doing the Work?

The person selling you the project is not always the person building it. Ask directly. Is it in-house? Offshored? Freelanced? None of those are automatically wrong, but you deserve to know, because it affects accountability, quality and timelines. We have seen too many sales pitches in Newcastle accents followed by builds from three continents away.

Question Nine: Can I See Current Examples You Built and Still Maintain?

Portfolios are easy to fake and easy to cherry-pick. Ask for sites they launched at least two years ago, that are still performing, and ideally speak to those clients. A designer whose old work is all dead or unrecognisable is a designer with a retention problem.

Question Ten: What Is Not Included?

Most quote disputes come down to this. Is copywriting included, or am I providing all the text? Imagery, stock or shot? Translations? Hosting for year one, or year two onwards too? SSL certificates? Accessibility testing? Cookie consent setup, which matters more than you think given the current legal landscape? Get it all in writing before signing.

• Copy and imagery: The single biggest hidden cost.
• Integrations: CRM, email, booking systems, payment gateways.
• Ongoing costs: Hosting, licences, support retainers.
• Post-launch changes: The first three months usually reveal wish-list items.

The Warning Signs

Fixed prices with no discovery. Promises of first-page Google rankings. Reluctance to share client references. Vague timelines. Ownership ambiguity. A designer who will not explain technical decisions in plain English. Any one of these is a yellow card. Two is a red.

The Bottom Line

A good website is a multi-year asset that earns its cost back many times over. A bad one is a rolling liability that costs you twice, once to build and once to replace. Ask the questions at the start. Trust your gut. And for the love of all that is holy, get everything in writing.