What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring a Web Designer?

Most people walk into that first call with a web designer completely unprepared. They talk about colors. They mention their competitor's site. They say something like "clean and modern." They hang up thinking it went well and have no idea whether this person is actually the right fit for the job.

Then three months later the project is stalled, the scope has ballooned, the platform choice makes no sense, and they are being charged extra for things they assumed were included.

I have been on both sides of this conversation for 28 years. I have taken these calls as the designer and I have watched clients come to me after getting burned somewhere else. The questions below are the ones that would have protected them. Ask all of them. Pay attention to how the answers feel, not just what is said.

1. Who Actually Builds the Site?
2. What Platform Will You Build On, and Why That One for My Project?
3. Do I Own Everything After Launch?
4. What Does the Timeline Look Like, and What Do You Need From Me to Hit It?
5. What Is Included, and How Do You Handle Scope Changes?
6. Can I See Live Sites You Have Built Recently?
7. What Happens After Launch?
8. One More Thing: the Questions They Ask You

Who Actually Builds the Site?

This is the first question and the most important one. Ask it directly.

At agencies, the answer is often not the person you are talking to. You are speaking with a project manager or an account lead. The actual developer is somewhere else, possibly freelancing on the side, possibly in another country, possibly juggling four other projects. You will never speak to them directly. Your feedback gets filtered, translated, and often diluted before it reaches the person doing the work.

A good answer: one person, the one you are talking to right now, builds the site from start to finish and is your main contact throughout. You can ask them a technical question and they can answer it without scheduling another call.

A red flag: "our team will handle that" or "you will have a dedicated project manager who coordinates everything." That means layers. Layers mean slower communication, higher cost, and a final product that no single person fully owns.

What Platform Will You Build On, and Why That One for My Project?

This question alone will tell you more than anything else on the list. Listen very carefully.

The wrong platform choice is one of the most expensive mistakes in web design, and it happens constantly. Not because designers are incompetent, but because agencies have certifications and specializations. They invested time and money getting good at one tool and now they use it on everything, whether it fits or not.

A few examples from the real world.

TYPO3 is a powerful enterprise CMS. It is genuinely good for large, complex, multilingual corporate platforms with editorial teams, complex permissions, and deep integrations. It is complete overkill for a 10 to 15 page marketing and branding site for a local or regional business. I have seen exactly this: an agency with a TYPO3 certification selling that platform to a client whose entire site could have been built in a weekend on something leaner. The client paid enterprise-level development fees, ended up with a system they could not touch themselves, and needed the agency for every single update. That dependency was the whole point from the agency's perspective.

Magento is another one. Built for large-scale e-commerce, complex catalogs, high transaction volumes, B2B pricing logic. It has its place. That place is not a shop with 80 products and 20 orders a day. I have seen a small shop built on Magento combined with TYPO3, running on cheap shared hosting, taking 10 seconds to load. The person inheriting that codebase wrote on a forum that he suspected the whole thing was "pretty much doomed and would need a rebuild anyway." He was right. The agency that built it had delivered a technically impressive solution for a problem that did not exist.

Shopware is the current version of this pattern in the German market. The paid cloud plans start at 600 EUR per month. That is 7,200 EUR per year before you pay a developer, before plugins, before maintenance. Shopware themselves state their platform is not the right solution for businesses that only sell a handful of products. Their words. I have seen merchants describe the experience of being put on Shopware as discovering that they needed apps for everything, that each app charged a recurring fee, that they were pushed onto increasingly expensive servers, and that the site still went down. One merchant put it well: "I thought it would be affordable but when we added it all up it was a lot more expensive than it seemed." For most small and medium e-commerce businesses, Shopify or a custom WooCommerce setup gets the job done cleanly at a fraction of the total cost.

And then there is WordPress. I ran a WordPress theme business for years. I know the platform well enough to have walked away from it. WordPress made sense as the default choice for most web projects for a long time. That time is passing for certain types of work. For a high-end branding site, a personal brand, a service business that needs to rank and load fast and make an impression, building on WordPress today and using a third-party page builder or fighting with Gutenberg is adding unnecessary complexity and weight. The result loads slower, breaks more often, needs constant plugin updates and security patches, and rarely looks as polished as it should. For top tier branding work, static Jamstack built with Next.js or Astro delivers a cleaner result, better performance, and far less ongoing maintenance. The right designer should be able to explain why their platform choice fits your specific project, not just the projects they usually take.

One more thing on this, and I will be direct about how I handle it personally. If a client insists on a platform I do not believe is the right fit for their project, I say so clearly. If they still want to push ahead with it, that client is probably not the right fit for me and they should shop around. I would rather lose the project than deliver something I know is going to cause problems two years from now. That is not arrogance. It is the only way to work with integrity.

While you are asking about the platform, ask about the domain too. I have seen it countless times. A business gets their first website built by an agency. The agency also registers the domain, in the agency's name. The client does not think about it at the time. Two years later they want to switch providers or just get control of their own asset and suddenly it is a negotiation. Sometimes the agency drags it out for weeks. Sometimes there are hostage fees involved. Your domain is yours. Make sure it is registered in your name from day one and that you have full access to the registrar account. Ask this before you sign anything.

A good answer: a clear explanation of why this platform fits your size, your goals, your team's ability to manage it, and your budget over time. Not just the upfront cost but the total cost. Not just what they are comfortable building but what is actually right for you. And confirmation that your domain is registered in your name.

A red flag: "we always use X" or "we are certified in X" without any explanation of why X is the right tool for your project specifically. Also: any suggestion that the agency will handle domain registration "for you."

Do I Own Everything After Launch?

You would be surprised how often the answer is no, or complicated.

Some agencies build on proprietary CMS platforms that only they can maintain. The code is theirs or the system runs through their infrastructure. You want to switch providers two years later and you find out your site cannot leave without a full rebuild. That is not an accident. It is a business model.

Ask specifically: who owns the code? Is it in a standard open-source framework? Can I hand this to any developer after we finish and have them continue the work? Can I access the repository?

The scare tactic you will sometimes hear is the reverse: agencies telling you that freelance work is risky because if the developer disappears, nobody else can touch it. That is nonsense when the work is done properly. A site built on Next.js or Astro using standard patterns and clean code can be picked up by any competent developer in that world. There are hundreds of thousands of people who know these frameworks. Nothing should be locked, obfuscated, or proprietary. If an agency uses that fear to justify their own lock-in, that is the thing to be afraid of.

A good answer: you own everything. The code is in a repository you control. Any developer can work on it. Here is how you access it.

A red flag: vague answers about "our platform," ongoing licensing fees for the CMS, or any suggestion that the code "only works with our team."

What Does the Timeline Look Like, and What Do You Need From Me to Hit It?

This question does two things. It tells you how organized the designer is and it forces an honest conversation about your own role in the project.

Most web projects run late. The single most common reason, and the one agencies will rarely admit, is that the client becomes the bottleneck. Content is not delivered. Decisions take weeks. Feedback comes in rounds from multiple people with conflicting opinions. Meanwhile the agency's team has moved to other projects and your work sits in a queue.

When a client comes to me with a site that needs to be redone, I often hear the same story. Endless meetings in the beginning. Long waits for feedback after each stage. A painful process of being asked to produce all the content while the agency sat waiting. The project stalled, the relationship deteriorated, and the final result reflected all of that friction.

My approach is different and it is worth asking any designer whether they do something similar. I try to get as much input from the client as possible upfront. But the moment I can move faster by generating content myself than waiting for the client to produce it, I switch approaches. Instead of bottom-up, asking the client to build everything from scratch, I go top-down. I draft the content, build the structure, and ask the client for corrections and modifications. It is much easier to react to something concrete than to create from nothing. Most clients are running a business, not a copywriting department. Working with what they are good at, which is knowing their business and refining what I put in front of them, keeps the project moving.

My standard timeline for a custom site is one to three weeks. Clients are often surprised to hear that. They are more surprised when it actually happens.

AI tools have made this faster. Not by replacing craft, but by compressing the time between thinking and building. The more optimized my process gets, the tighter that window becomes. One to three weeks is a real commitment, not a sales line.

A good answer: a specific timeline with clear milestones. An honest list of what they need from you and when. Some indication that they have a plan for keeping momentum when the client side gets slow.

A red flag: a vague "it depends" without any structure, or a timeline that stretches to months for a standard small business site. Also worth noting: a process that requires weeks of wireframes, mockups, and approval rounds before a single line of code gets written is often about billing hours, not about delivering a better result.

What Is Included, and How Do You Handle Scope Changes?

Vague scope is where web projects go to die.

If the proposal does not specify exactly what pages, features, and deliverables are included, you will be negotiating every addition as a change order. The designer says one thing, you assume another, and three weeks in you are arguing about whether a contact form was included in the original quote.

Ask for a clear written list of everything that is covered. Then ask specifically: what is not included? What happens if something new comes up? How is that priced?

There will always be moments where the project needs to pivot. That is normal and not a problem in itself. The problem is when those pivots are handled differently by each side, one thinking it is a natural evolution of the project, the other reaching for an invoice. When the scope is clearly agreed upfront, a pivot is just a conversation. You correct the scope together, agree on any adjustment, and everyone knows what comes next. The friction disappears because nothing is a surprise.

My approach is to fix the price upfront after the discovery call and to handle any genuine new additions as a separate, transparent conversation. Not a surprise invoice. A discussion that happens before the work, not after.

A good answer: a detailed written scope, a clear process for handling changes, and a designer who seems to have thought about this before you asked.

A red flag: anything billed purely by the hour without a ceiling, vague language about "additional work billed separately," or a designer who seems annoyed by the question.

Can I See Live Sites You Have Built Recently?

Not a portfolio PDF. Not mockups. Live sites, in a browser, right now.

Click around. Open them on your phone. Run them through PageSpeed Insights if you want to be thorough. See how they actually perform.

Look at whether the sites feel finished or like they were rushed to launch. Look at whether the calls to action are clear or buried. Look at whether the content is doing real work or just filling space. A designer who builds sites that make their clients money will have sites that feel purposeful, not just pretty.

Ask whether you can speak to one of those clients. A designer confident in their work will say yes without hesitation. Personally, I ask my clients for Google Business Profile reviews. They are public and they are on my site. We are living in a free world. Call those clients up directly and ask whether I did a good job and whether they would hire me again. They will tell you. Any designer confident in their work should be able to say the same.

Also pay attention to the technology. If every site in their portfolio runs on the same platform, the same template structure, the same visual patterns, that tells you they have a formula. Formulas are efficient for the designer. They are not always right for you.

A good answer: live links sent immediately, public reviews you can verify, and an offer to connect you with a past client without any hesitation.

A red flag: a portfolio that is mostly screenshots, work that is months or years out of date, or any friction when you ask to speak to someone they have actually worked with.

What Happens After Launch?

The site goes live. Then what?

This is where a lot of relationships break down and a lot of ongoing costs appear that nobody discussed upfront.

Ask specifically: what does it cost to make a small change after launch? What if something breaks? Who handles hosting and domain renewal? Are there any ongoing fees baked into the project that have not been mentioned yet?

For the platforms that demand it, ongoing costs can be significant. Monthly plugin subscriptions, hosting that scales unexpectedly, a CMS that needs developer involvement for anything beyond basic edits, a retainer you did not know you were signing up for. These can easily double or triple the real cost of a website over two or three years compared to the headline price you were quoted.

The sites I build are hosted on modern infrastructure, sometimes Cloudflare, sometimes Vercel, sometimes other providers depending on what fits the project. Generally it is cheap, often close to nothing. No plugins to update, no security patches to chase, no page builder to fight. If a client needs changes after launch, they pay my hourly rate for the actual time it takes, nothing more. No retainers unless someone specifically asks for them. The architecture is designed to last and to be cheap to maintain.

Some clients, especially those who are used to WordPress, want to be able to make small edits themselves. That is completely fine. There are easy-to-use CMS solutions that can be layered onto a modern Jamstack build for exactly that purpose. We just set it up. For everyone else, send me an email and I make the change. I charge 95 EUR per hour for post-launch work, there is no minimum fee, and I track everything in five minute increments. A two-sentence copy change does not cost you an hour.

A good answer: clear hourly rates for post-launch work, transparent hosting costs, no mandatory retainers, and a straight answer about what breaks and how often.

A red flag: vague answers about "maintenance packages," monthly fees that were not in the original proposal, or a system so complex that the client cannot make even simple edits without the agency's involvement.

One More Thing: the Questions They Ask You

Pay attention to what the designer asks you in that first call. A designer who is genuinely focused on results will ask hard questions before they talk about anything visual.

What does your current site do well and where is it failing? Who is the customer you most want to reach? What does a conversion look like for your business, a call, a booking, a purchase? What is your competitor doing that you are not? What does the person who lands on your site already know about you and what do they need to find out?

If the first call is mostly about aesthetics, colors, fonts, whether you like flat design or something more textured, that tells you something. A site that performs is built around answers to business questions. The visual layer comes after.

The designer who asks the sharp questions in the first 20 minutes is the one who will build something that works.

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If you want to know what a straight-talking discovery call looks like in practice, I explain my full process and pricing in the post on how much it costs to hire a web designer. Or skip the reading and just call. Twenty minutes and you will know exactly what your project costs and when it gets done.

Contact me here.

The Platform Question Is a Proxy for Everything

I want to come back to the platform question because it is bigger than it looks. It is not just a technical decision. It is a signal about how this designer thinks.

A designer who recommends the right tool for your job, even if it is not the one they know best, is a designer who is working for you. A designer who maps every project onto their existing skill set is working for themselves. That difference shows up in the platform choice, in the scope conversation, in the timeline, in what gets handed to you at the end.

The pattern I see over and over is this. An agency builds expertise in one system. They pursue certifications, train their team, build internal workflows around it. That investment has to pay off, so every new client gets steered toward that system. The pitch is usually dressed up as a recommendation. "We find that TYPO3 gives our clients the most flexibility." "We have had great results with Magento for businesses like yours." What it actually means is that this is the tool they know and the tool that justifies their rates.

WordPress is the clearest version of this right now. Spend five minutes in any web design community and you will find veteran WordPress developers defending the platform with real conviction. SEO, flexibility, the ecosystem, the community, they have a good answer for every criticism. Some of those answers are legitimate. But watch carefully when the conversation turns to performance, security overhead, page builder bloat, or why a static Jamstack site loads in under a second while their WordPress build needs a caching plugin, a CDN plugin, an optimization plugin, and still scores 68 on PageSpeed. The defensiveness is the red flag. A developer who is genuinely working in your interest does not need to defend their tool. They just need to explain why it is right for your project. If the explanation sounds like a debate they have had many times before, it probably is.

The client does not know enough to push back. They trust the recommendation because the agency sounds confident. Three years later they are still paying for platform licenses, still calling the agency for minor updates, still sitting on a system that is slower and more expensive to operate than it needed to be.

The right question to ask is not "what platform do you use?" The right question is "why is this platform the best choice for a project of my size, my budget, and my team's ability to manage it?" If the answer is specific and honest, that is a good sign. If the answer is vague or leans heavily on the agency's expertise rather than your needs, that is the answer.

What the Best Clients Bring to the Table

This cuts both ways. The questions above are about evaluating the designer. But the best projects I have worked on happened because the client also showed up prepared.

The clients who got the best results were the ones who could clearly explain their business in a few sentences, who knew what a successful site looked like for them in practical terms, and who were willing to be decisive when decisions were needed. They did not need to know anything about technology. They needed to know their own business and trust someone else with the technical execution.

The clients who struggled were the ones who arrived with vague goals, changed direction mid-project, brought in opinions from people who were not part of the original brief, or disappeared for weeks when decisions were needed.

A good designer will manage around some of that. But the more you arrive with clear answers to the basic business questions, the faster and better the result will be. What does success look like six months after this site launches? If you can answer that in one sentence, you are ready to start.

The First Call Tells You Most of What You Need to Know

You can run through every question on this list in 20 minutes if the call is focused. You do not need a lengthy discovery process spread across multiple meetings. One sharp call, both sides asking direct questions, covers everything.

Pay attention to how the designer handles the call itself. Are they on time? Do they listen or do they start pitching immediately? Do they ask questions about your business before talking about design? Can they give you a price on the call or do they need to go away and "put together a proposal" for two weeks?

I give every prospective client a price on the call. Same day. Because by the end of a 20-minute conversation, I know what the project involves. If I cannot tell you what something costs after 28 years, something is wrong.

The designer who runs a sharp, direct, well-prepared first call is almost certainly the designer who will run a sharp, direct, well-prepared project. The designer who meanders, over-promises, avoids specifics, and follows up three days later with a 12-page document is probably going to run the project the same way.

Trust that first call. Ask the questions. Listen to the answers. The right fit is usually obvious within the first ten minutes if you know what you are looking for.