When you ask a web designer how much a website will cost, the number that comes back tells you almost nothing on its own. Two quotes at £900 can mean wildly different things. One includes the words on every page, a year of hosting and somebody who answers the phone next March. The other is five template pages, an invoice and a goodbye email.
Price is the easiest thing to compare, which is why nearly everyone compares it first and then finds out what they bought later.
The questions below are the ones that decide whether you’re still happy in eighteen months. Ask all of them. A decent designer will answer without flinching, and the ones who get twitchy have just given you a very useful piece of information for nothing.
Who Owns The Domain, And Whose Name Is On It?
This is where I’d start, because it’s the one that causes the most damage when it goes wrong. Ask a web designer who will register your domain and what name goes on the registration. The answer you want is short: yours, with your email address as the registrant contact, and you get the login.
The answer that should worry you is “don’t worry, we handle all that”. Handled can mean the domain sits in their account under their name. If you fall out, or they stop trading, you’re negotiating for the address your customers already have printed on your van.
For a .co.uk, the registrant is recorded with Nominet, the UK registry, and you can be listed there as the owner even if somebody else does the technical work. There’s no good reason for a designer to be the named owner of your domain. If a designer tells you it’s simpler that way, ask a web designer whether “simpler” means simpler for you or simpler for them.
Renewals matter too. A .co.uk costs around £10 to £15 a year. Ask who pays it, when it falls due, and where the reminder goes. Domains that lapse because a reminder went to an old Hotmail account are depressingly common.
Ask A Web Designer What Happens To The Files If You Leave
Here’s where you need to be honest with yourself about which model you’re buying, because the answer differs and neither one is dishonest.
On a traditional one-off build, you’re paying for the finished thing. Ask a web designer, in that case, to confirm in writing that on final payment the design files, the images they’ve licensed and any custom code become yours, and that they’ll hand over the hosting login or a full backup on request. If they say the code stays theirs and you’re licensing it, that isn’t automatically a scam, but it changes what you’ve bought and it should change the price.
On a pay monthly arrangement, including ours, the site is built and maintained as part of an ongoing service. You own your domain and your content. The build itself sits with the provider while you’re paying, in the same way a leased van isn’t yours. That’s the trade-off for not paying £2,000 up front, and anybody who dresses it up differently is being slippery.
What you’re entitled to ask either way: can I take my text, my photos and my domain and walk? If the answer is anything other than yes, stop.
How Many Rounds Of Changes Are Included?
“Unlimited revisions” sounds generous and usually isn’t, because it either means the project drifts for four months or it means the designer has quietly priced their patience into the fee. I’d rather see something concrete: two rounds of feedback on the design, then a snagging list before launch.
Ask what counts as a revision. Moving a testimonial up the page, no. Deciding halfway through that you want a completely different colour scheme and structure, clearly yes. Get the boundary stated out loud, because the argument nobody ever wins is the one about whether change number nine was included.
Then ask about after launch. Small edits are the ones that actually pile up over a year: a new price list, a staff member who’s left, a phone number change. Ask a web designer what a text edit costs six months from now. A one-off builder might charge £45 to £60 an hour with a minimum charge. A managed service should include reasonable content changes in the monthly fee, and should tell you what “reasonable” means.
Who Writes The Words?
Most disappointing websites aren’t badly designed. They’re well designed and empty, because the designer was waiting on copy the owner never had time to write, and eventually somebody pasted in three paragraphs about being passionate about quality.
So ask directly: am I writing this, are you writing it, or are we doing it together? All three answers can work. What you can’t afford is nobody knowing.
If they’re writing it, ask how they’ll get the information out of you. A twenty minute phone call where they ask what jobs you actually want more of is worth more than a fourteen page questionnaire. If you’re writing it, ask for a word count per page and an example, and ask what happens to the timeline while they wait for you. It’s usually the client who causes the delay, not the designer, and a straight talker will warn you about that at the start.
Photos, same question. Ask a web designer whether stock images are included, whether they’re properly licensed, and whether your own phone photos are good enough. For a mobile groomer or a joiner, ten decent phone shots of real work beat any stock library going.
Who Keeps It Running After Launch?
A website isn’t a leaflet. It’s software sitting on a server, and it needs updating. Ask a web designer what happens when a plugin update breaks the contact page on a Sunday, and listen for whether the answer includes a person or just a policy.
Specifics to ask about: how often the site is backed up, where the backups are kept, whether the SSL certificate renews automatically, and who applies security updates. If you’re on a self-managed hosting plan, all of that is your job, and the day it becomes obvious is the day the site goes down.
Also ask what happens if your site is hacked or defaced. “We’ll restore last night’s backup at no charge” is a good answer. Silence, or a vague reference to their supplier, is not.
If you’d rather not think about any of this again, that’s precisely the case for a managed setup. Our own pay monthly website design service bundles hosting, updates, backups and support into the monthly fee from 24.99 plus VAT, and you can see the mechanics of that on how pay monthly websites work.
How Long Will It Actually Take?
Ask for a date, not a duration. “Two to three weeks” starts from when they have everything they need, which might be six weeks after you paid the deposit because you still haven’t sent the photos.
A good answer sounds like this: five to ten working days from the point we have your content, a review call, then live within two days of your sign-off. A worrying answer is a very short timescale with no mention of what they need from you, because that designer has built the delay into your side of the fence without telling you.
Ask a web designer what their current queue looks like too. Somebody genuinely busy in October will say so. Somebody who can start this afternoon, every time, might be quiet for a reason.
What Is Not Included?
This is the question almost nobody asks, and it’s the one that saves the most grief. Ask a web designer to tell you plainly what falls outside the quote.
- Email hosting. A website and a professional email address are two separate services, and a surprising number of people find that out on launch day.
- Online payments or a shop. Adding a card checkout is a different job to a five page brochure site.
- Bookings. We embed a system like Calendly or your existing diary tool happily, but we don’t custom-build booking software, and anyone quoting £400 to build one from scratch is underestimating it.
- Copywriting, photography, logo design.
- Ongoing SEO work. A well-built site gives Google what it needs to index you properly. That isn’t the same as a monthly campaign, and the two get blurred in sales conversations constantly.
- The cheapest tier’s limits. On our own Starter package there’s no contact form, just your phone number and email on the page. We say that up front because finding out afterwards is annoying.
Ask what the cheapest option leaves out, then decide if you can live without it.
What Happens When The Relationship Ends?
Every arrangement ends eventually. You sell the business, they retire, you outgrow each other. Ask a web designer what the exit looks like before you’re in it.
The things to pin down: notice period, whether there’s a minimum term, what you can take with you, and how long they’ll keep a copy after you go. Twelve months minimum then rolling monthly is normal and fair. A three year contract on a brochure site is not, and I’d walk.
Ask a web designer whether they’ll release the domain within a few days of a written request, without a fee. Any hesitation there tells you how the last month of the relationship will feel.
Can I Ring Two Of Your Clients?
Portfolios are curated. A phone number isn’t. Ask a web designer for two customers in a similar trade who’d take a five minute call, and ask those people one thing: what’s it like when you need something changed.
Also check the live sites, not the screenshots. Load them on your phone on 4G and count the seconds. Anything over about three and you’re looking at somebody who doesn’t test properly. Try the contact form. Genuinely, send one and see if it arrives.
Monthly Or One-Off?
Pay monthly suits you if a £2,000 bill is a real obstacle, if you want somebody else handling hosting and updates, and if you’d rather email a request than log into anything. It’s the wrong answer if you’ve got the cash, you want to own the build outright, and you’re comfortable managing hosting and renewals yourself. Some people are, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Ask a web designer to break the monthly figure into its parts: hosting, support, edits, the build itself. If they can’t, they’re either not tracking it or they’d rather you didn’t add it up.
So What Should You Ask A Web Designer First?
Start with the domain. If your business name is registered to somebody else’s account, everything after that is built on rented ground, and it’s the single hardest thing to unpick later.
After that, the exit question. Somebody who explains cheerfully how you’d leave is somebody who isn’t relying on you being stuck. If you want to run these past us before you commit anywhere, get in touch and ask the awkward ones. We’d rather answer them now than argue about them in a year.