Five Questions to Ask Any Web Designer Before You Hire Them

Choosing a web designer is difficult because the evidence in front of you is the evidence they chose to show. Every portfolio is the best work, every proposal reads well, and the sites in the gallery all looked good on launch day. The five questions below are useful because they are hard to prepare for, and because in each case the way someone answers tells you as much as what they say.

Ask them on a call rather than by email. You are listening for whether the person has thought about this before, or is thinking about it for the first time while you watch.

1. "If we stop working together, what do I take with me?"

Ask this first, before any discussion of price, because the answer determines what you are buying.

What you want to hear is specific and unhurried: the code is yours, it sits on hosting in your name, here is where the content lives, here is how it would be handed over, and you would not need our permission to do any of it. Someone who works this way answers in about fifteen seconds, because it is simply how their projects are set up.

What should give you pause is vagueness dressed as reassurance - "we'd never hold anything hostage", "we've never had that happen", "everyone stays with us". That may all be sincere and still leave you with nothing you can pick up and move. The follow-up that settles it: would I need you for it to keep working?

Some answers are honestly "you would be leaving with an export and rebuilding". That is a real arrangement and can be a reasonable one. It just needs to be priced as renting rather than as owning, and you should know which one you are signing.

There is a longer version of this - the four ownership questions worth getting in writing - in our piece on how to read a website quote. On the call, the one question is enough.

2. "Can you show me a site you built three years ago?"

Every portfolio shows recent work. Almost nobody asks to see old work, which is precisely why it is the most revealing request you can make.

Then go and look at it. Is it still live, or has the client quietly moved on? Does it still load quickly, or has it silted up? Has it been maintained - new content, current details, prices from this decade? Does it still look considered, or does it look like the year it was made?

A designer who can point you at a three-year-old site that still works well is showing you something a gallery cannot: that their work survives contact with a real business over time. It is also the fastest way to find out whether they build things that keep going after the invoice is paid.

Two fair caveats, and a good answer will offer them before you do. Clients rebrand, get acquired and change direction, so not every old site is still standing. And if the site has been unmaintained for two years, that is often the client's decision rather than the builder's. What you are listening for is whether they can talk honestly about what happened to their old work, not whether every example is perfect.

3. "Who will actually do the work, and who will I be speaking to?"

The people in the meeting are not always the people who build the site. That is normal in larger agencies, and it is not automatically a problem - but you should know it before you sign rather than discover it at the first handover.

Ask plainly: who designs it, who writes the code, are any parts subcontracted, and who is my point of contact when something needs deciding on a Tuesday afternoon. Then ask the version that gets the real answer: if I have a question in week three, who replies, and how long does that usually take?

Smaller studios and freelancers usually have the simplest answer - the person in front of you does the work - and that concentration is both the advantage and the risk. It is reasonable to ask what happens if that one person is ill or unavailable for a fortnight mid-project. Someone who has been doing this a while will have an answer ready, because they have been asked before, or it has happened.

4. "What do you need from me, and when do you need it?"

This question looks like admin. It is actually the strongest test of experience on the list.

Someone who has delivered a lot of websites knows that projects rarely stall on design or code. They stall waiting for words, images, sign-offs and decisions from the client - and they will tell you so directly, with a schedule attached: we need the copy for these pages by this point, we need your logo files in this form, we need one person who can approve things, and here is what happens to the timeline if that slips.

Someone who says "oh, we'll just need a few bits as we go" has either not run many projects or is avoiding an awkward conversation. Both cost you the same in the end, usually as a launch date that moves twice.

The best answers include a warning you did not want to hear. If you do not have professional photography, or nobody has written the copy, a good designer says so at the brief and helps you plan for it - rather than building something beautiful around placeholder text and letting you discover the problem a week before launch.

5. "What would you tell me not to spend money on?"

The honesty test, and the one that separates a consultant from a salesperson.

Everyone selling websites has a list of things they would love to build for you: the animation, the custom illustration set, the elaborate booking flow, the blog you will not write. A designer worth hiring will happily talk you out of at least one of them, because they would rather your budget went where it will actually return something - usually photography, copy, or the two pages that carry the whole argument.

If the answer is that you need all of it, you have learned something. If the answer is "for a business like yours, I would not bother with X, and I would put that money into Y", you have found someone thinking about your outcome rather than their invoice. It is also a useful preview of how they will behave when you ask for something in month two that is not a good idea.

What you are listening for underneath

Across all five, the same signal: specificity. Good answers contain nouns - the repository, the redirect map, the sign-off, the person, the date. Weak answers contain reassurance, and reassurance is what people offer when they have not done the thing enough times to have details about it.

A few questions worth skipping, because they sound rigorous and tell you nothing. How many websites have you built? rewards volume over care. Do you do SEO? invites a yes from everyone. Can you guarantee we'll rank first? is worse than useless: nobody honestly can, and the ones who say yes are the ones to avoid. If ranking matters to you, ask instead what they do technically to make sure nothing is holding the site back - that question has real answers.

And once you have a number in front of you, judge it against what this work costs generally rather than against the other quote in your inbox. Our cost calculator gives honest market ranges for freelancers, studios and agencies across the UK and Europe, including ranges well below ours. It is easier to have a straight conversation about price when you already know the shape of the market.