Choose a web designer on three things you can verify yourself, not on the portfolio: how their live client sites perform on a phone, what the written scope says about ownership and what is included, and who you will actually be talking to while it is built. Everything else — style, awards, the number of years — is easier to claim than to check.
Hiring someone to build your website is uncomfortable precisely because you are buying something you cannot inspect in advance. What follows is the way to make it inspectable: the checks that take ten minutes, the questions that belong in writing, and the signals that are worth walking away from.
Check the work, not the pictures
Portfolio screenshots show a design at its best moment on the widest screen. Your customers will see it on a four-year-old phone with two bars of signal. So look at the live sites instead — every designer worth hiring will name a few:
- Open two or three on your own phone. Does the page appear in about a second? Does the text reflow, or do you pinch and scroll sideways? Do the buttons hit properly with a thumb?
- Run one through Google PageSpeed Insights. It is free, takes two minutes, and gives a mobile score out of 100 with the specific things holding the page back. It is the only part of this list that returns a number.
- Read it as a customer. Within a few seconds, is it clear what the business does, who it is for and how to get in touch? That clarity is design work, and it is what turns a visitor into an enquiry.
If several of a designer's live sites are slow on a phone, that is not bad luck — it is how they build. And if a slow site is your current problem rather than a prospective designer's, the causes are usually the same handful: why is my website slow walks through them.
Six questions that belong in writing
Ask these before any payment. It is not distrust — it is the difference between a project with a defined end and one that drifts:
- What exactly is included, page by page? "A website" is not a scope. A list of pages and features is.
- Who writes the words and supplies the photographs? Almost no quote includes them, and this is the single most common reason projects stall for months.
- Who owns the code and design files at the end? The answer should be you, on final payment, in the contract rather than in an email.
- What happens if I want to leave? Can another developer pick this up, or is it locked to a platform or a licence only they hold?
- What does it cost to keep running after launch? Hosting, domain, any subscriptions, any upkeep — as a yearly figure, not a shrug. The full arithmetic of that is in how much website maintenance costs.
- Who, by name, will be doing the work? Whether the person you are impressed by is the person who builds it decides how the next six weeks feel.
Freelancer, studio or agency
The four routes and what each realistically costs. Market ranges are independent figures, not ours; the studio row is our own published prices:
| Who builds it | Typical cost | Fits when |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | ~$200–$600 / year | Testing an idea, a temporary page, a budget under $500 |
| Freelance designer | $1,500–$8,000 one-time | A straightforward site when you can judge the work and chase it yourself |
| Small studio | $1,900–$12,000 one-time | A site that has to sell, from the people who actually build it |
| Full-service agency | $6,000–$35,000+ | Strategy, research and a team — when the budget carries the overhead |
Freelance, agency and builder ranges: GruffyGoat, as of July 2026. The studio row is our own price list. The wider comparison — what each route buys and what it costs over three years — is in how much a small business website costs.
None of these is automatically the right answer, and the price bands overlap more than the labels suggest. What actually separates a good outcome from a bad one at any price is whether the scope, the timeline and the ownership were written down before anyone started.
Red flags
- No written scope before payment. Everything else on this list follows from this one.
- The code stays with the designer. You are then renting your own website, and the price of leaving is a rebuild.
- A mandatory monthly fee just to keep it online. Upkeep can reasonably be a service — ours starts at $95/month and is optional — but a site you paid to build should not switch off when you stop paying.
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. The promise itself tells you how honestly the rest of the work will be described.
- A price far below the market ranges. Usually something is missing from the scope — most often the content, sometimes the ownership.
What "good" looks like in practice
A designer who is a safe hire tends to do the same unglamorous things: answers questions plainly and in writing, quotes a fixed number rather than an hourly meter that can drift, shows work you can open and measure, says what is not included as clearly as what is, and tells you when your project does not need them. That last one is the strongest signal of the lot — someone willing to lose a job by saying "a builder would be fine for this" is someone whose "yes" is worth something.
How we work, for comparison
So you can hold this page to its own standard. We quote a fixed written price after a 5-minute brief, before any work starts: $1,900 for a landing page, $2,900 for a multi-page business website. The code and design files transfer to you on final payment, with 30 days of fixes included. Upkeep afterwards is optional, from $95/month. Every client site we have built is published with its measured PageSpeed scorecard on the case studies — open them on your phone and run the check above on us first.
And if the honest answer for your project is a freelancer, a builder or nobody yet, the brief will come back saying that. It costs us a job and saves you a bad one.