What to ask before you hire a web designer.

It should be yours, in an account you control, with your card on file. Not the designer's account, not their agency's, not 'we'll handle it'.

This is the single most important question on the list. Everything else can be rebuilt if it has to be. A domain you don't control can be held, lost when someone stops paying, or simply become unreachable when the person who registered it stops answering email — and it's the address every customer, every link and every listing points at.

There are two honest models and you should know which you're buying. Either you own the site and can take it elsewhere, or you're renting it on a platform and it goes away when you stop.

Renting isn't inherently wrong — it can be reasonable value. But it should be stated plainly, not discovered two years later when you want to move and find there's nothing to move.

Ask specifically: will I get the repository, or an export, or nothing? A site you can't take a copy of is a site you don't own regardless of what the invoice says.

It's also worth asking where it's hosted and whether you'll have an account there. 'It's on our hosting' is a dependency to go in with your eyes open about.

If everything you offer lives on one page, that page has to compete for every search at once, and it will lose most of them. One page per service is the difference between ranking for four things and ranking for none.

This is also a decent test of whether the person thinks about search at all, or only about layout.

The answer you want is that they're written per page. The answer that should worry you is that they're generated from the business name, or not mentioned as something anyone decides.

It's a small thing that reveals a large thing: whether the site is being built to be found, or just to exist.

Phrase it however you like — 'will the text be in the page source, or added by JavaScript?' Static HTML is faster, and it's readable by the AI assistants that increasingly answer questions before anyone reaches a search results page. Most of those crawlers don't run JavaScript.

It's a technical question but the consequence is commercial: a site built the wrong way here can be invisible to a whole category of search.

'SEO included' means nothing on its own. Ask what specifically — page titles, structured data, sitemap, Google Business Profile, content, links? Which of those, and how will you know it happened?

Be wary of anyone guaranteeing a position. Nobody controls the ranking, so nobody can guarantee it. That claim is either about a phrase nobody searches, or a sign of tactics that cost you later.

Changing a phone number, adding a service, swapping a photo. Can you do it yourself, and if not, what's the turnaround and the cost?

Businesses that can't update their own site stop updating it, and a site that's two years stale reads as a business that might have closed.

A portfolio full of launch screenshots tells you someone can produce a nice-looking page. A site still working and still current two years later tells you they built something maintainable.

Ask whether that client is still with them, and why or why not. The answer is usually informative.