Questions to Ask a Web Designer Before You Sign

Most business owners vet a web designer the same way they vet a restaurant: they look at pictures of the finished product. A portfolio tells you what a designer is capable of on a good day. It tells you almost nothing about what it will be like to work with them for the next three months.

The expensive mistakes in web design are rarely design mistakes. They are process mistakes — silence, missed deadlines, surprise charges, and disputes over who owns what. Those don't show up in a screenshot. The questions below exist because each one heads off a documented, common failure. Ask them before you sign anything.

The one question that predicts the most

Before you ask the designer anything, ask their past clients. Request contact details for two or three businesses they've built sites for — and make sure these are references who agreed to be contacted, not names lifted from a testimonial page.

Then ask each one the same question: did they deliver on the original timeline they promised?

A designer's former clients have no incentive to lie to you. They're not on commission. If the answer involves a lot of throat-clearing about "scope changes" that you never asked about, you've learned more from that hesitation than from any sales call. Designers whose past clients speak well of them tend to be willing to share references. We cover how to run those conversations properly in how to vet a web designer's references.

Who owns the domain, the hosting, and the code?

This is the single most consequential question in the list, and it has three parts:

A surprising number of businesses discover the answers only when they try to leave. We break down the full ownership picture in who really owns your website. If a designer bristles at this question, that is itself an answer.

How do revisions work?

Every project involves changes. The question is what counts as a change. Some questions to settle in writing before starting:

"Unlimited revisions" sounds generous and usually isn't; we explain why in "Unlimited revisions" and other fine print. What you want is a specific number with a specific definition.

What happens if the deadline slips?

Every timeline in a proposal should come with a consequence attached. Ask directly: if the project runs late, what happens? A discount? A refund of the deposit? Nothing?

You're not asking because you expect them to fail. You're asking to see whether the deadline is a real commitment or a marketing estimate. A designer who has never thought about what a slip costs you is a designer who hasn't been asked enough. We cover what a real timeline should specify in what should a website timeline include.

How are payments structured?

The traditional arrangement — half up front, half on completion — is common, and it has a weakness you can see without trying very hard: once the deposit clears, the designer has already been paid most of the money, and your project is now competing with projects that haven't been paid yet.

Milestone-based payments (deposit, midpoint, completion) keep the incentives aligned on both sides. Deposits are legitimate — designers get burned by vanished clients too — but the structure should protect both of you. We cover the options in website deposits and milestone payments.

Who actually builds it?

The person who sells you the project and the person who writes the code are not always the same person. Agencies hand work to account managers, freelancers subcontract to developers, and sometimes that's fine — as long as you know about it going in.

Ask: who does the design, who writes the code, and who answers when something breaks after launch? Outsourcing discovered mid-project, after problems appear, is one of the recurring complaints in first-person accounts of failed web projects. More on that in who is actually building your website.

How fast do they reply before you pay?

Pay attention to response times while you're still a prospect. If a designer takes four days to answer a sales inquiry — the phase where you're the most exciting thing in their inbox — that tells you something about the pace you'll experience once you're an existing client with a question about a form that stopped working.

Slow replies before payment aren't proof of anything. But fast, personal replies before payment are the minimum standard, and you should see them.

Two questions we get asked

Should I get multiple quotes? Yes — three is usually enough. More than that and you're just collecting proposals to avoid deciding. Compare them on what's included, not just the total; the cheapest quote is often the most expensive by the time you add what it left out. Our Quad Cities pricing breakdown shows what drives the differences.

Should price be the deciding factor? It should be a factor. But when you're comparing a custom build against a rented monthly template, compare the total cost over three years, not the month-one number — the math changes more than you'd expect. We walk through it in the real math on "$299/month" websites.

Before you sign

None of these questions are hostile. A good designer has heard all of them before, answers them without flinching, and often raises them before you do. The ones worth worrying about are the designers who find them uncomfortable.

Questions about your own project? We answer every enquiry personally, within one business day.