Most people hire a website designer once, maybe twice, in the whole life of their business. You do it at the moment you know the least about it, usually while you are also registering the business, sorting insurance, and trying to land your first customers. Then you live with that decision for years.
That is what makes this choice bigger than it looks. You are not buying a product off a shelf. You are picking the person who builds and holds the front door of your business.
Here is what actually matters, and what I would ask before handing anyone money.
People judge you on the design before they read a word
Stanford ran a three year study on how people decide whether a website can be trusted, with more than 4,500 participants. The finding that should stop you: 46.1 percent of people said they judged a site's credibility partly on its visual design. Layout, typography, font size, colour. Not the content. The look.
That number is uncomfortable, because it means a visitor can decide you are not a serious business before reading a single sentence about what you do. Fair or not, that is how it works.
So when someone tells you design is "just the pretty part" and the content is what counts, they are half right and half wrong in a way that costs you customers.
Slow websites lose money, and the numbers are not small
Google commissioned Deloitte Digital and the data firm Fifty-five to study this properly. They looked at 30 million user sessions across 37 brands in retail, travel, and luxury.
Improving mobile load time by one tenth of a second increased retail conversions by 8.4 percent. Average order value went up 9.2 percent.
One tenth of a second. That is faster than you can blink.
Now think about what a page loaded with a slideshow, six tracking scripts, a chat widget, and four web fonts is doing to a customer standing in a parking lot on a weak signal. Every one of those choices was made by whoever built the site. Speed is not luck. It is the result of somebody deciding to care.
Ask who owns it, and get a straight answer
This is the question that separates a good hire from an expensive lesson.
Some builders hand you a website. Others hand you a rental agreement with a website inside it. The site looks the same on day one. The difference shows up in year two, when you want to move, or change something, or stop paying.
Ask these plainly:
- Do I get the source code, or is it locked to your platform?
- Whose name is on the domain registration? It should be yours.
- If I stop paying you, does the website keep working?
- Can I move it to another host without rebuilding it?
If any answer is vague, that vagueness is the product.
Ask what happens after launch, because that is most of the relationship
Building a site takes days or weeks. Owning one lasts years. Most of your experience will be the part nobody discusses during the sales pitch.
Small things pile up. A price changes. You add a service. A photo needs swapping. If every one of those means an invoice and a two week wait, you will simply stop updating your site, and a stale website is worse than an honest one.
So ask how long a small edit takes, what it costs, and how fast they reply when something breaks. Then notice how fast they replied to you while they still wanted your business. That is the fastest they will ever be.
What Google actually cares about, minus the hype
You will meet people who tell you that a perfect performance score is the secret to ranking first. That is not what Google says.
Core Web Vitals, the metrics for loading, responsiveness, and visual stability, are used in Google's ranking systems. Google also states plainly that the signal is lightweight compared to other ranking factors, and that chasing a perfect score purely for SEO may not be the best use of your time.
Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways. A slow, unstable site is a real problem worth fixing. Paying someone monthly to chase a number that Google itself calls lightweight is not a strategy. Anyone selling you the second version is either behind or hoping you will not check.
Ten questions to ask before you hire anyone
- What is the total price, and what would make it go up?
- Do I own the source code when we are done?
- Is the domain registered in my name?
- What happens to my site if I stop paying you?
- How long does a small text change take, and what does it cost?
- How fast do you reply when something is broken?
- Can I see a site you built that is still live a year later?
- How does the site perform on a phone, on a normal connection?
- Who writes the content, me or you?
- What happens if I want to leave?
You do not need to understand the technology to use this list. You are listening for whether the answers are specific. Specific answers come from people who have thought about the situation you are about to be in. Vague answers come from people who would rather you did not.
Where I stand on all of this
I will tell you my own answers so you can hold me to them.
You get a fixed price before any work starts, so the number you are told is the number you pay. You get the source code. The domain goes in your name. If you ever want to leave, you take the site with you, and I will help you move it. I reply within 24 hours, and edits are included in the monthly care plan rather than billed a line at a time.
None of that is charity. It is just what the deal should look like when nobody is relying on you feeling stuck.
If you are picking someone right now, use the list above on me too. If my answers are not better than the alternative, hire the alternative.
Sources
- Stanford Web Credibility Research, Persuasive Technology Lab, B.J. Fogg. Findings published as How Do Users Evaluate the Credibility of Web Sites? (ACM, 2003)
- Milliseconds Make Millions, Deloitte Digital and Fifty-five, commissioned by Google, 2019. Also published by Deloitte
- Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results, Google Search Central
- Understanding Google Page Experience, Google Search Central