How to choose a web designer: the questions that actually matter

Most people choose a web designer the same way: look at three portfolios, pick the prettiest, check the price is not mad, and hope. It is understandable, and it is close to useless, because the portfolio and the price are the two pieces of information that tell you least about whether the finished site will bring you any work.

A portfolio tells you what a designer's best clients let them do. It does not tell you whether those sites rank, whether they load, whether the client can update them, or whether the designer is still answering emails. The price tells you even less on its own, because the headline figure and the first-year cost are frequently different numbers.

What follows is the list I would use if I were hiring somebody to do this job, including the parts that are inconvenient for me to write down.

The eight questions

1. Who is actually doing the work?

At an agency, the person who sells you the project is often not the person who builds it, and neither of them may be the person who writes the copy or does the search work. That is not automatically bad. It is how capacity gets built. But you should know, because every handover is a chance for the thing you explained carefully to arrive slightly wrong.

Ask directly: who designs it, who builds it, who writes the words, who does the SEO, and who will I be emailing in month four? If the answer involves four names, that is fine, as long as it is four names and not a shrug.

2. Is search work included, or sold separately?

This is the question that catches the most people out. A great many web designers build the site and then, some weeks after launch, mention that search engine optimisation is a separate engagement. By then the structure is already set, and the structure is most of the SEO.

Page structure, headings, URLs, internal links, image weight and load speed are design and build decisions that happen to determine whether a site can rank. Deciding them without reference to what people actually search for, and then trying to retrofit search later, is the expensive way round. Ask whether keyword and intent research happens before the design or after it. Sites that never rank are usually sites where nobody asked that question.

3. Who owns the domain, the code and the accounts?

The answer should be you, on all three, without qualification. Your domain should be registered in your name at a registrar you can log into. The code should be yours to take elsewhere. Analytics, Google Business Profile and Search Console should be under your account with the designer added as a user, not the reverse.

This matters far more than it sounds. Domains registered in an agency's name are the single most common way small businesses get held hostage, and it usually only surfaces at the exact moment the relationship has gone wrong. If someone cannot answer this cleanly, that is the whole answer.

4. What happens when I want to change a price or add a page?

Some sites are built so you can edit the text yourself. Some are built so every change is a support ticket. Both are legitimate, and they cost very different amounts over five years.

Ask what a typical small change costs and how long it takes. Ask whether you can do it yourself, and if so, ask to see the interface before you commit rather than after. A demo of the editing experience tells you more about the next five years than the portfolio does.

5. What does the first year actually cost?

The build price is one number. The first-year cost includes hosting, the domain, any premium plugins or themes, an SSL certificate if it is not included, email, any licence fees, and the support arrangement. On a builder platform it also includes the monthly subscription without which the site stops existing.

Ask for the total, in writing, for year one and year two. A designer who cannot produce that quickly has not thought about it, which tells you something. I have written a full breakdown of what a UK website costs in 2026, including the costs nobody quotes.

6. How many rounds of changes are included?

Vagueness here is where projects go bad. Two rounds is common and workable. Unlimited revisions between first and final draft is better if you can get it. What you want to avoid is no stated policy at all, because that means the boundary gets negotiated later, when you are already invested and irritated.

Ask what counts as a round, what happens if you change your mind about something fundamental in week three, and what triggers an extra charge.

7. What is it built on, and why that?

You do not need to understand the answer technically. You need to hear a reason that is about your business rather than about the designer's convenience. WordPress, Shopify, a page builder, a static build and a custom application all have legitimate uses, and each has a failure mode.

A reasonable answer sounds like: Shopify because you are selling forty products and need stock control, or a static build because you have twelve pages that rarely change and you want it fast. An unreasonable answer is the name of a tool with no sentence after it. If the honest answer for your situation is a £14-a-month builder, a good designer will tell you, and I have written about exactly when that is the right call.

8. What happens if I want to leave?

Ask it plainly, before you sign anything. You are looking for: you take the domain, you take the code, you take the accounts, nothing switches off, and there is no exit fee. Any hesitation on any of those four is worth understanding fully before money changes hands.

The answers that should end the conversation

What to check yourself, in ten minutes, for nothing

Before any conversation, take three sites from their portfolio and do this:

• Open them on your phone, on mobile data, not wifi. That is how most of your customers will arrive. If it takes more than about three seconds to show you something useful, that is what your site will do too.
• Search Google for the business name plus its town. If a designer's own clients cannot be found by name, the search work is not happening.
• Search for the service plus the town. "Electrician Maidstone", not the business name. This is the search that brings in money, and it is a much harder test.
• Run one through PageSpeed Insights. It is free and takes thirty seconds. You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for whether anyone thought about it. I have written about what those numbers actually mean.
• Look at the designer's own website. If it is slow, unfindable or last updated in 2019, that is data.

What you should expect to pay in the UK in 2026

Those ranges are for a normal small-business site. Complex builds with custom animation, integrations or e-commerce at scale run past them in every category.

The three things that actually decide it

Strip away the rest and it comes down to this.

Whether the person who designs it understands search. Not whether SEO is on the invoice. Whether the structure of the site was decided by someone who knew what it had to rank for. This is the difference between a website and a brochure that happens to be online.

Whether you can get hold of them in month eight. Launch is easy. The test is what happens when your prices change, or something breaks on a Friday, or you want a page adding before a trade show. Ask for a client you can ring. A designer with happy long-term clients will produce one without hesitating.

Whether they told you something you did not want to hear. This is the one I would weight highest. Anybody who agrees with everything is selling. Somebody who tells you your budget is wrong for what you are asking, or that you do not need the thing you asked for, or that a template would serve you better this year, is giving you the thing you are actually paying for, which is judgement.

Where I fit, and where I do not

It would be daft to write this and pretend I am not one of the options. I am a one-person studio: I do the design, the copy, the build and the search work, single pages start at £495, most multi-page builds land between £1,795 upwards, and clients own the domain, the code and every account outright with no lock-in on anything.

The honest limitation is capacity. One person means one holiday, one bout of flu, and a small number of builds running at once. If your business needs a support rota with a guaranteed response time, or six workstreams running in parallel, an agency is the better purchase and I will say so on the first call rather than the fourth.

If you want a second opinion on a quote you have already had, send it over. I will tell you whether it is fair, and I will tell you if the answer is that you should take it. Ask me.