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. A portfolio shows the best work, a proposal is written to read well, and the sites in a gallery looked good on launch day. The five questions below are useful because they're hard to prepare for, and because the way someone answers tells you as much as what they say.

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

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

Ask this first, before any discussion of price, because the answer decides what you're 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 can answer in about fifteen seconds, because that's 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 will be "you'd be leaving with an export and rebuilding". That's a real arrangement, and it can be a reasonable one, as long as the price reflects that you will not own the site. You should know which kind you're signing up to.

There's 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?"

Portfolios tend to show recent work. Asking to see older work is less common, and it can tell you more.

Then go and look at it. Is it still live, or has the client moved on? Does it still load quickly, or has it slowed down over time? Has it been maintained, with new content and current details and prices? 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 holds up in a real business over time. It also shows whether what they build keeps working after launch.

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 a site has gone unmaintained for two years, that's often the client's decision rather than the builder's. What you're listening for is whether they can talk openly about what happened to their old work, not whether every example is perfect.

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

The people on the call are not always the people who build the site. That's normal in larger agencies, and it's not automatically a problem, but you should know it before you sign rather than find out 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 more specific version: 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's 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've 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, but it's a good test of experience.

Someone who has delivered a lot of websites knows that projects stall more often waiting for words, images, sign-offs and decisions than on design or code. They'll 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's what happens to the timeline if that slips.

If the answer is "we'll need a few bits as we go", ask for specifics. Vague requirements tend to show up later as a launch date that moves.

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 leaving you to discover the problem a week before launch.

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

This one shows whether someone is advising you or selling to you.

A designer will usually have things they'd enjoy building for you: the animation, the custom illustration set, the elaborate booking flow, a blog you may not have time to write. A good one will talk you out of at least one of them, so that your budget goes where it will do more - usually photography, copy, or the two pages that carry the whole argument.

If the answer is that you need all of it, that tells you 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've found someone thinking about what the site needs to achieve. It's also a useful preview of how they'll respond 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 often what people offer when they have not done something enough times to have details about it.

A few questions worth skipping, because they sound rigorous and tell you little. How many websites have you built? rewards volume over care. Do you do SEO? is one almost anyone will say yes to. Can you guarantee we'll rank first? is worse than useless: nobody can promise it, and anyone who says yes is worth avoiding. 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.

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 market price ranges for freelancers, studios and agencies across the UK and Europe, including ranges well below ours. It's easier to talk about price when you already know the shape of the market.

And if you're weighing up more than one proposal, our prompt for comparing quotes will read them alongside each other and give you back the questions each one leaves unanswered, several of which are on the list above.