What should I ask a web designer before hiring them?
Ask who owns the site and domain at the end, what happens if you leave, what year two costs, who actually does the work, and to see three live sites you can open on your phone. Those five expose most of the difference between suppliers. The rest of this article is the other seven, and what a bad answer sounds like.
Last reviewed 9 August 2026
Before anything is built
- 1. Who owns the website, the code and the domain when it is finished? The answer should be "you", without qualification. If the domain will be registered in their name, ask them to change that before you sign anything.
- 2. What happens if I want to leave? You should be able to take the files, the database and the domain. An exit fee, or a refusal to hand over, means you are renting something you believed you bought.
- 3. Is this built from a template or from scratch? Neither answer is wrong. A vague answer is. Follow up with: what happens when I want something the template does not do?
- 4. Who will actually do the work? Small studios and freelancers do the work themselves. Larger agencies may subcontract. Both are fine, being unable to get a straight answer is not.
About money
- 5. Is this a fixed price, and what specifically would make it change? A fixed price that quietly becomes hourly at the first change request is not fixed.
- 6. What will this cost me in year two? Hosting, domain, licences, updates, support. A supplier who has never been asked this will hesitate, which is itself informative.
- 7. What is excluded? More revealing than what is included. Content writing, photography, extra revisions and post-launch changes are the usual four.
- 8. What is the payment schedule? A deposit with the balance on completion is normal. Full payment up front, from a supplier you have not worked with, is not.
About what happens after launch
- 9. Who is responsible if the site goes down at 2am? Someone should be, and you should know whether it is them, you, or nobody.
- 10. How do I make a small change, and what does it cost? Updating a price or a photo should not require a quote and a two-week wait.
- 11. Are backups taken, and has a restore ever been tested? "The host does backups" is the answer of somebody who has never had to use one.
- 12. Can I see three sites you built that are live now? Then open them on your phone in front of them. This single test does more work than the other eleven combined.
Answers that should worry you
Some responses are reliable warning signs regardless of how the rest of the conversation goes.
"We guarantee you first place on Google." Nobody can. Google does not sell organic positions, and a guarantee means either a term nobody searches for or a technique that will eventually be penalised.
"You do not need to worry about the technical side." You do not need to understand it, but a supplier unwilling to explain what they are doing is a supplier you cannot evaluate.
"The website is free, you just pay monthly." Read the term length and the total. Then ask what you own at the end.
"We will need to keep the domain in our account for technical reasons." There are no such technical reasons.
Silence about ongoing costs. Every website has them. A quote that does not mention them is incomplete, not cheap.
What a good supplier will ask you
The questions should run both ways, and a supplier who asks nothing before quoting is about to sell you something generic.
Expect to be asked who your customers are and how they currently find you, what you want a visitor to actually do, which competitors you rate and why, whether you have content and photographs, and, the important one, whether you have a deadline that matters, such as a season starting or a premises opening.
If nobody asks what the site is supposed to achieve, nobody is designing for an outcome. They are producing pages.
A note on cheap and expensive
Neither price tells you much on its own. A £400 site from someone who does good work quickly can be excellent value. A £12,000 site from an agency with an office to fund can be exactly the same website with more meetings.
What actually correlates with a good outcome is whether the supplier asked good questions, answered yours plainly, and can show you live work. That costs nothing to check and is a better predictor than the number at the bottom of the quote.
Common questions
Should I use a freelancer or an agency?
A freelancer is usually cheaper and you talk directly to the person building it; the risk is what happens if they are ill, busy or move on. An agency has continuity and more people, and you pay for that structure. For a small business site either can work, the deciding factor is usually whether the individual or team can show you live work and answer the twelve questions well.
Is it worth paying for a proper brief or discovery phase?
On a small brochure site, usually not, it should be a conversation. On anything with logins, payments or complex logic, absolutely, and skipping it is how projects go over budget. The test is whether you receive something concrete and useful at the end, such as a written specification you could hand to a different developer.
What if I already have a website and I am not sure it is any good?
Ask two or three suppliers to look at it and tell you honestly whether it needs rebuilding or fixing. The ones who say fixing when fixing is the answer are the ones worth talking to further.
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