Most small businesses hire a web designer the same way they hire most service providers: a referral from someone they know, a Google search, maybe a Facebook group recommendation. They look at a portfolio, the price feels okay, and they go for it.
That process works fine sometimes. But it skips a set of questions that would quickly separate the people who know what they’re doing from the ones who will take your money, hand you a WordPress site with a theme they bought for $59, and move on.
Here are five questions worth asking.
1. What happens if I need to update the site after launch?
This one surfaces a lot. The answer tells you whether you’re going to be dependent on this person forever or whether you’ll actually own the thing you’re paying for.
Some designers hand you a site you can update yourself through a CMS. Some hand you a site where you need them for every change. Some hand you a site where you can edit some things but not others, and the explanation for why is “it’s complicated.”
None of those are necessarily wrong, but you need to know which one you’re getting before you sign anything. If you want to be able to add a new staff member or update your hours without calling someone, say that upfront and make sure the answer is yes.
Also ask: what happens if you go out of business or stop doing web work? Where does the site live? Who owns the domain? If the answer to any of those is “it’s in my account,” that’s a problem.
2. How will people find this site on Google?
If the answer is anything other than a thoughtful response about SEO, be cautious.
A lot of designers build sites that look great and rank nowhere. Looks and search visibility are almost entirely separate problems, and not everyone who builds websites has put serious time into understanding search.
The follow-up worth asking: will the site have proper title tags, meta descriptions, and structured data? Will blog content be properly indexed? Will the URLs be clean? Will there be a sitemap?
You don’t need to understand all of those terms — you just need the designer to answer yes without hesitating and explain what they mean. If they get vague or pivot to talking about design again, that tells you where their knowledge ends.
3. Who actually builds the site?
This one catches a lot of people off guard, but it matters. Some “web designers” are actually project managers who outsource the work to a freelancer in a different country. Sometimes that works fine. Often it doesn’t.
If you’re talking to an agency or a larger shop, ask who on the team will be doing the actual build. Is there a single developer? A team? What happens if that person leaves mid-project?
I build everything myself, which means you’re always talking to the person who built your site. That’s not the right answer for every project, but it matters for the kind of small business sites I work on, where the client needs to reach someone who actually knows how the thing works.
4. What technology are you building on and why?
A lot of web designers default to whatever they know. That’s not always wrong — someone who’s built 50 WordPress sites is going to build you a better WordPress site than someone who’s used it twice — but you deserve to know what you’re getting and why it was chosen for your specific situation.
Some things worth understanding:
WordPress is flexible and widely used. It also requires regular plugin updates, has a long history of security vulnerabilities if it’s not maintained, and can get slow fast if the theme and plugins aren’t well chosen.
Page builders (Wix, Squarespace, Webflow) are fast to build on and easy to update yourself, but they come with monthly fees, platform lock-in, and usually slower page performance.
Custom-coded sites built with modern frameworks (Astro, Next.js, SvelteKit) are typically faster, more secure, and more SEO-friendly, but they require someone who knows what they’re doing.
There’s no universal right answer, but the designer should be able to explain why they chose the approach and how it fits your specific needs.
5. Can I see examples from businesses like mine?
Portfolio work from e-commerce sites doesn’t tell you much if you’re a therapy practice. Restaurant sites are a different problem than law firm sites. Ask to see work that’s similar to yours in terms of industry, size, and purpose.
Pay attention not just to how the sites look but to how they perform. You can run any URL through Google’s PageSpeed Insights for free. A site that looks great but scores 40/100 on performance is going to hurt your search rankings and frustrate visitors on mobile.
Also look at whether the sites in the portfolio have been updated since launch. A site that was built three years ago and hasn’t changed isn’t evidence of an ongoing relationship — it might just mean the client couldn’t reach anyone to make changes.
These five questions won’t guarantee a great outcome, but they’ll filter out most of the situations where you end up with a site that looks fine but doesn’t work, doesn’t rank, or locks you into a dependency you didn’t sign up for.
If you’re in the Salt Lake City area and want to talk through what your site actually needs, reach out. First conversation is always free.