How to choose a web designer in the UK: 12 questions (and the red flags)

Let's get the awkward bit out of the way first: I'm a web designer, and this is an article about how to choose a web designer. That's a bit like a butcher writing "how to choose a butcher". So here's the deal I'll hold myself to: every question in this article is one you can, and should, fire straight back at me. At the end I'll invite you to do exactly that, with links to my live sites and my prices so you can check my answers against reality.

Why does this article need to exist? Because most people hiring a web designer have never done it before, and the industry has some genuinely nasty traps in it. Not "slightly overpriced" traps. "You don't own your own domain and leaving costs you your Google rankings" traps. Twelve questions, what a good answer sounds like, what a bad one sounds like, then the red flags.

01Who owns the domain?

This is the biggest one, so it goes first. Your domain (yourbusiness.co.uk) is your address on the internet. Your Google rankings attach to it. Your email runs on it. It's on your van and your business cards. Whoever controls the domain controls all of that.

Some designers register client domains in their own name. Often it's laziness rather than malice, but the effect is the same: if you fall out, or they vanish, or they fancy charging £300 to "release" it, you're negotiating for your own business's address. I've seen tradespeople abandon years-old domains, and the rankings attached to them, because it wasn't worth the fight.

A good answer sounds like: "The domain is registered in your name. I'll manage the renewals and settings for you, but you're the legal owner and I'll hand over the login whenever you ask."

A bad answer sounds like: "Don't worry about that, we handle all the technical stuff." That's not an answer. That's the trap wearing a friendly voice.

02What happens if I want to leave?

Ask this before you've paid a penny, while everyone's still being nice. You want to know three things: do you keep the domain (see question one), do you get the website files, and is there any fee or notice period. A designer who's confident you'll stay because the work is good has no reason to make leaving hard. A designer whose business model depends on you being stuck will get vague here.

Good answer: "You keep the domain, I'll hand over the files, and you can cancel the monthly any time. No exit fee." Bad answer: anything involving a "site buyout", a licence that means you never actually owned the website, or a platform the site can't be moved off. Some builder platforms genuinely cannot export a working site, which means "your" website only exists while you keep paying them.

03Can I see live sites, not just portfolio images?

Portfolio screenshots prove someone can make a nice picture. They don't prove the site was ever finished, works on a phone, or is still online. Ask for URLs of live client sites, then actually click them on your phone.

While you're there, check two things. First, is it a real business that's still trading and still using the site? A portfolio full of quietly abandoned sites is telling you something. Second, does the designer's style suit your trade? A builder's site has a different job to do than a wedding photographer's.

Good answer: a list of clickable links to real businesses, happily given. Mine are on the work page, all 13 of them live. Bad answer: "client confidentiality" for basic brochure websites, or a portfolio of suspiciously perfect images with no URLs attached.

04What will my mobile speed score be?

Google ranks fast sites above slow ones, and most of your visitors will be on a phone, often on patchy signal in a van or on site. Speed isn't a nerd metric, it's a "do I appear on Google and do people stay" metric.

You can check this yourself, for free, before you hire anyone. Go to Google's PageSpeed Insights, paste in the designer's own website, and look at the mobile score. Then paste in two or three of their client sites. If the whole portfolio scores 40 to 60 on mobile, that's what you'll get too.

Good answer: a number and a commitment. "My builds score 90+ on mobile, here's a client site, test it yourself." Bad answer: "Speed isn't really something we focus on" or, more commonly, a designer who doesn't know what you're talking about. If you'd like a head start, my free website check runs this test on your current site and tells you plainly what's slow.

05What exactly does the monthly fee cover?

Almost every web package has a monthly fee now. That's not automatically bad; hosting, domains and maintenance are real ongoing costs. What matters is whether the fee maps to actual things, so ask for the list. Hosting? Domain renewal? Software updates? Content changes when you email them? Backups? Some level of SEO work? Each of those is legitimate. "General support" covering nothing in particular is not.

Good answer: an itemised list, and a straight answer on what's not included. For the record, my £20 a month covers hosting, your domain, maintenance and small content updates, and it's all written on the services page. Bad answer: a fee that's suspiciously large (£80+ a month for a brochure site needs justifying) with a shrug when you ask what it buys.

06Is it a template, a builder, or coded? And does it matter for me?

There are three broad ways your site can be built: a template on a platform like Wix or Squarespace, a theme on WordPress, or custom code written for your business. I build custom-coded sites, so discount my bias accordingly.

Templates and builders are fine for plenty of businesses. Where they cost you is speed (they load a lot of code you never use, which drags the mobile score from question four) and portability (some platforms can't be moved away from, which drags you back to question two). Coded sites are faster and fully portable, but you can't edit them in a visual editor.

Good answer: the designer tells you plainly which one they use, and why it fits your case rather than theirs. Bad answer: dressing a £15-a-month template up as bespoke work, or refusing to say what the site is built on at all. If you want the long version of this argument, I've written up WordPress vs custom and Wix vs custom separately.

07Who writes the copy?

The words on the site convince a visitor to ring you, and they're what Google reads to decide which searches you show up for. Yet copy is the thing most web projects quietly skip: the designer assumes you're writing it, you assume they are, and the site launches with "Welcome to our website" and three paragraphs of filler.

Good answer: "I write the copy based on what you tell me about the business, you review and correct it." Or, honestly: "Copy isn't included, budget £X for a copywriter." Either is fine, as long as someone owns the job. Bad answer: "Just send us your text" said to a plumber who's never written a page of marketing in his life. That's how sites end up saying nothing, and a site that says nothing gets no enquiries, which is a whole article of its own.

08What happens with Google? Is SEO included, and what specifically?

"SEO included" is the most abused phrase in this industry. It can mean anything from "we'll do genuine ongoing work to rank you locally" to "we'll tick a plugin checkbox and never think about you again". The word "specifically" is your friend here.

Ask: what exactly will you do? Reasonable answers include proper page titles and descriptions, town and service pages, setting up your Google Business Profile, submitting the site to Search Console, and ongoing content or review work if you're paying monthly for it. Ask which searches they're aiming to rank you for, and roughly when. An honest designer will name modest, local, specific terms and a timescale in weeks and months, not days. I've written about what ranking in 90 days actually takes if you want to calibrate.

Bad answer: "SEO is all built in" with no detail, or the opposite scam: a cheap site with SEO sold back to you later as a mystery £200-a-month add-on, also with no detail.

09How do updates work, and what do they cost?

Sites need small changes: new photos, a price update, Christmas opening hours. The question is how those happen and what they cost, because "£45 minimum charge per amendment" turns a cheap site expensive fast.

Good answer: a clear process ("email or WhatsApp me, small changes are included in the monthly, big new pages are quoted first") and a typical turnaround. Bad answer: every change billed by the hour with no definition of what counts as small, or a designer who becomes mysteriously hard to reach once the site is live. Ask their existing clients how fast changes actually happen; it's one of the most honest signals going.

10What's the total cost over three years?

Headline build prices are designed to be compared. Real cost is the build price, plus 36 months of fees, plus amendments, plus any "extras" that turn out to be essential. Do the maths on a three-year horizon before you compare anyone with anyone.

A £1,000 build at £25 a month is £1,900 over three years. A "£299 special offer" at £79 a month with paid changes is over £3,100. The cheap one wasn't the cheap one. I've broken down what UK small business websites actually cost in a separate article with real numbers if you want the full picture.

Good answer: the designer does this maths with you, unprompted, on paper. Bad answer: attention repeatedly steered back to the headline price, or a fee structure so complicated you can't compute the three-year figure at all. Complexity in pricing is rarely an accident.

11How long is the contract, and what are the exit terms?

Related to question two, but it deserves its own line because this is where the trap usually lives: twelve or twenty-four month minimum terms, auto-renewal clauses that quietly roll you into another year unless you cancel in writing within a specific window, and cancellation fees that make leaving cost more than staying.

None of that is necessary for a small business website. Hosting is cheap to provide; a designer doesn't need a year of guaranteed payments to cover it. Long lock-ins exist for the designer's cash flow, not for your benefit.

Good answer: "Rolling monthly, cancel whenever." Bad answer: a minimum term plus auto-renewal plus an exit fee. Any one of those alone might be defensible. All three together is a business model built on you not reading the paperwork.

12Who am I actually talking to?

At bigger agencies, the person who charms you at the sales meeting is not the person who builds your site. That's not automatically bad, but you should know whether your questions from this list are being answered by the builder or by someone paid to say yes. Ask: who does the actual work, and can I speak to them?

With a solo designer you get the opposite trade-off: the person you talk to is the person who builds it, but there's one of them, so ask what happens if they're ill or away. (My answer: everything is standard code any developer can pick up, and you hold your own domain, so you're never stranded. That's questions one and two doing their job.)

Bad answer: a salesperson who can't answer the technical questions on this list and won't put you in front of someone who can.

The red flags, collected

If you only skim one section, make it this one. Any single flag is a reason to slow down and ask more questions. Two or more, and I'd walk away regardless of how nice the portfolio looks:

• No prices anywhere. A designer serving small businesses who won't publish even a starting price is planning to quote based on what you look like you can afford.
• The domain registered in their name. The number one hostage mechanic. Non-negotiable: it's yours or it's no deal.
• "SEO included" with nothing specific. If they can't tell you what they'll actually do and which searches they're targeting, the answer is nothing.
• 12-month lock-ins with auto-renewal. Confident designers don't need to trap you. Read the renewal clause before signing anything.
• No live client sites. If nobody who paid them is still using the work, you're about to find out why.
• Guaranteed #1 on Google. Nobody can guarantee this. Google says so themselves. Anyone promising it is either lying to you or planning to "rank" you for a search nobody types.

Cheap isn't the risk. Hostage terms are.

Here's a thing people get backwards. The common worry is "if it's cheap, it must be rubbish". But price and trap are different axes. A £2,000 site where the agency owns your domain, locks you in for two years and bills every change is a far worse deal than a £100 site you fully own and can walk away from tomorrow.

The worst outcome in this industry isn't a slightly plain website. It's being stuck: paying monthly for a site you don't own, on a domain that isn't yours, with rankings you'd lose by leaving. A mediocre site you own can be improved or replaced. A hostage situation can only be paid for, or escaped at a cost. That's why the ownership and exit questions on this list outrank the design questions.

So judge cheap sites on the same questions as expensive ones, not on the price tag. I've put my own cheap offer through exactly that comparison in the £100 website vs the agency quote; the short version is that the terms matter, not the number.

Now run every question against me

I said I'd hold myself to this list, so here it is, question by question. Your domain is registered in your name, always. You can leave whenever you like, keep the domain and the files, no exit fee, no contract. My live sites are on the work page, 13 of them, all real UK businesses you can click and test; the outcomes are on the results page. My builds are custom-coded and score 90+ on mobile, which you can verify on PageSpeed Insights in the time it takes the kettle to boil. My prices are public: £100 to build, £20 a month for hosting, domain and maintenance, small updates included. SEO specifics are listed on the services page, not hidden behind "included". And the person you'd talk to is the person who builds it, because there's only one of me.

And the bit that makes the decision easier: before you pay anything, I build you a free preview of your homepage. Real design, real copy, for your actual business. If you don't like it, you say no thanks and owe nothing. It's the strongest answer I have to question three, because instead of judging me on other people's sites, you judge me on yours.

If I fail any of these tests for your situation, genuinely, hire someone who passes them. The point isn't that I'm the right designer for everyone. It's that whoever you hire, anywhere in the UK, should be able to look you in the eye and answer all twelve.

Common questions I get

"Do I really need to check the designer's own website speed?"

It's the fastest honest signal available. A designer who can't make their own site fast on mobile isn't going to make yours fast, and it takes you two minutes on PageSpeed Insights to check. Test mine while you're at it.

"Is a solo designer riskier than an agency?"

Different risks. An agency survives one person being ill; a solo designer answers their own phone and costs half as much. If you hold your domain and your files, you can move on from anyone, solo or agency.

"What if I've already signed with someone who fails these questions?"

Start with the domain: ask, in writing, for it to be transferred into your name; a decent designer will just do it. Then check your renewal date and cancellation window so an auto-renewal doesn't catch you. If you're weighing up whether the site itself is worth keeping, the free website check gives you a straight answer.