Hiring a web designer is the rare business decision most owners make once a decade, which is exactly why so many make it badly. You would never hire a technician without asking where he trained, what he drives, and whether he will be the one who shows up. Yet contractors sign five-figure website contracts every week after a single sales call with a person who will never touch the work, on the strength of a portfolio that may have been built by somebody else entirely.
What follows is the interview to conduct before you sign — nine questions, in order, with the answers that should end the meeting early. None of them requires technical knowledge. All of them require the vendor to tell the truth in plain English, which is itself the first test.
The nine questions
1. Who actually builds it?
Not who sells it, manages it, or “oversees” it — who writes the code and the copy. Many agencies resell work produced elsewhere, sometimes overseas, through two or three layers of hand-offs, each of which adds cost and subtracts accountability. The right answer is a name, ideally the one belonging to the person across the table. This shop’s answer is on the about page, and the ten-day process shows exactly who does what, and when.
2. Who owns the site when we part ways?
The most important question on the list, and the one most often answered with a pause. If the reply involves the words “platform,” “license,” or “proprietary,” you are renting. Rented sites can be held, priced up, or switched off. You should own the domain, the content, the code, and the right to carry all of it to another builder on any Tuesday you like — the full argument is in our guide to leaving a rented website.
3. How fast will it load on a phone?
Ask for a number, not an adjective. A customer with a dead AC is standing in a hot kitchen with two bars of signal, and a page that takes six seconds to arrive is a page she will never see. The anatomy of slow contractor sites — and why the fix is rarely another plugin — is laid out in Six Seconds to Nowhere.
4. Will it book jobs into my field software?
A contact form that emails your office is a 1998 solution with a 2026 price tag. A modern contractor site should write bookings directly onto your board — ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber — with the customer, address, and time window attached. If the designer has never done it, your company will be the experiment.
5. How will we know what it produced?
The answer should be cost per booked job, reported monthly, from tracking you can audit yourself. Anything softer — traffic, impressions, “engagement” — is a report about the weather. Run your own baseline through the cost-per-job calculator before the meeting, so you have something to hold the promises against.
6. What happens to my rankings during the switch?
A careless migration can erase years of search position in an afternoon. The right answer involves one-to-one redirects, a resubmitted sitemap, and a builder who has done it many times — the method behind WordPress replacement and every platform move this shop handles.
7. Do you know this trade?
An agency that builds for dentists on Monday and dog groomers on Wednesday will build you a perfectly pleasant website that knows nothing about cooling season, emergency intent, or why a membership is worth more than a tune-up. Ask what they know about your busiest week. The work page shows what trade-specific looks like in practice.
8. What does it cost after launch?
The build price is the headline; the ongoing cost is the story. Hosting, maintenance, plugin updates, retainers, and “platform fees” can quietly double the real price inside three years. Get every recurring number in writing. The market ranges, and what each tier buys, are on the pricing page.
9. Can I talk to the person doing the work — today?
Call the number on their website. See who answers. In this trade you already know what it means when nobody picks up.
The red flags, in brief
- The salesperson cannot name who will build the site.
- Ownership of the site, content, or domain is anything other than yours, in writing.
- Success is reported in visits or impressions instead of booked jobs.
- A twelve-month minimum on a project that should take ten days.
- A portfolio of identical templates wearing different logos.
“You already know how to hire. Hire the builder the way you would hire a technician.”
Still weighing options? Read the honest comparison of alternatives to the big agency, see what a site that converts actually looks like, and then put this shop through the same nine questions on a free estimate call. The answers are short, and every one of them comes in writing.