Nine questions to ask before you hire anyone to build your website

Most bad website experiences are not caused by bad work. They are caused by things that were never discussed, because the owner did not know they were things to discuss.

These nine questions take about ten minutes to ask. Ask them of anyone: an agency, a freelancer, a platform, a relative, and us. The answers tell you more than any portfolio.

1. What is the total monthly cost, every vendor included?

Not the platform fee. The whole list: hosting, the domain, the builder, the store, the booking tool, the chat widget, the SEO plugin, the backup service. Ask for it as one number. If the answer arrives as a list of things you will be billed for separately, that list is what you are actually buying.

2. Who owns the domain?

It should be you, registered in your name, with you holding the login. This is the single most common way small businesses lose control of their web presence. It costs nothing to get right at the start and can be very hard to fix later.

3. What happens to my site if I stop paying?

There is a fair answer and an unfair one. Fair: the site comes down and you can take your content and domain elsewhere. Unfair: the domain is not yours, the content is not exportable, and leaving means starting from zero. Ask before you sign, not when you are trying to leave.

4. Can I change a price myself, without asking you?

Ask for a demonstration, not a yes. Have them show you the exact screen where a price is changed. If the demonstration involves code, a support ticket, or a request queue, then every future correction has a cost, and small corrections will simply not get made.

5. Can I undo a mistake?

This one sounds minor and is not. Without an undo, most owners stop touching their site after the first scare, and the site goes stale. With one, people edit freely and the site stays true.

6. How does it look on a phone, and can I change that separately?

Most of your visitors will be on a phone. Ask to see the site on an actual phone, not a shrunken browser window. Then ask whether the phone version can be adjusted without changing the desktop one. Often it cannot, which is why so many small business sites have a hero image with the text unreadable on mobile.

7. What happens when someone fills in the contact form?

Ask where it goes and how fast you find out. A form that quietly drops into an inbox you check twice a week is a lead generator for your competitors. The realistic answer for a local business is that enquiries need to reach you by text or by phone within minutes, not by email eventually.

8. Will I be found in Google, and what specifically is being done about it?

Be suspicious of confident promises about rankings. Nobody can promise a position. What they can tell you concretely is whether the site has real page titles and descriptions, a sitemap submitted to Google, structured data for a local business, image alt text, and pages that actually name the services and the town you work in. If those are in place you have done the honest part of SEO. Everything else is time.

9. Who do I call when it breaks on a Saturday?

Get a name or a channel and a realistic response time. "It will not break" is not an answer. Everything breaks eventually. What matters is whether there is one person to call or six vendors pointing at each other.

How to use the answers

You are not looking for perfect scores. Plenty of good arrangements have a weak answer somewhere. You are looking for surprises: the question that produces hesitation, or a different answer than you assumed.

The two that matter most are number 2 and number 4. Own your domain, and be able to change a price yourself. Get those two right and almost everything else is recoverable.

Ask us the same nine. We would rather answer them now than have you discover an answer you do not like in month eight.

The Instinctor team