Most people buy a website roughly twice in their working life. The person selling it does this every week. That gap is the whole problem, and it is why so many small businesses end up with a site they cannot edit, cannot move, and cannot leave.
You do not need to understand the technology. You need twelve questions and a sense of what a straight answer sounds like.
Before the work starts
Who owns the website when it is finished?
The only acceptable answer is that you do. The domain registered in your name, the code and content yours, the accounts in your company’s name with you as the billing contact. Ask specifically whether you own the design files and the content.
Watch for a “we own the platform, you license it” arrangement. That can be legitimate, but you need to know it up front, because it means you are renting and can never take the site elsewhere.
Where will it live, and whose account is it?
If the answer is a hosting account controlled by them, ask what happens if you part ways. There is nothing wrong with managed hosting, and there is a lot wrong with being unable to get your own site off it.
Who registers and controls the domain?
It should be registered to your business, with your email as the contact. This is the single most common way small businesses get held hostage, and it costs nothing to get right at the start.
What exactly is included, and what is not?
Ask for the boundary in writing. How many pages. Who writes the words. Who sources the photographs. Whether the price includes a logo, or forms, or a booking system, or moving the old site’s addresses across. “A website” is not a scope.
Who writes the copy?
The most common cause of a project stalling for two months. Somebody has to write the words, it is harder than people expect, and if nobody was assigned it, the site sits at ninety percent finished while everyone waits.
If they write it, ask to see writing they have done for a business like yours. If you write it, ask when they need it and what happens to the timeline if it is late.
What does the timeline actually depend on?
A good answer names what they need from you and when. A vague “six to eight weeks” with no dependencies is a number, not a plan.
About what happens after launch
Can I edit it myself, and how much of it?
Get a demonstration. Ask them to show you changing a paragraph and adding a photograph on a real site. Some builds let you edit everything, some let you edit text only, some require a developer for any change at all. All three are legitimate. Finding out afterwards is not.
What happens when something breaks at seven on a Friday?
You are asking whether there is a support arrangement, what it covers, what it costs, and how fast. “Just email me” from a one person business is an honest answer if they mean it. Silence on the question is not.
Who keeps it updated, and is that included?
Software needs patching. If nobody is doing it, the site becomes a security problem within a year or two. Ask whether updates, backups, and monitoring are part of the arrangement or a separate plan.
What happens to my search rankings?
Only relevant if you have an existing site. The right answer mentions redirects: mapping every old address to its new equivalent so the traffic you have earned does not vanish. If they look blank at this question, they have lost somebody’s rankings before and will lose yours.
Can I see a site you built three years ago?
Better than a portfolio of new work. You learn whether their sites age well, whether the client is still using it, and often whether the client is still speaking to them.
Can I speak to two clients, one recent and one from a few years back?
Ask the older one whether they can still edit the site, whether it has been updated, and how long support took the last time they needed it.
What the answers should sound like
You are not testing for expertise. You are testing for straightness.
Good signs: a written scope with the exclusions named. Willingness to say a thing is out of scope or would cost more. Questions back to you about your customers and how you actually get work. A rough range early rather than a refusal to talk numbers.
Bad signs: everything is easy, everything is included, nothing takes long. That is a person who has not thought about it and will discover the difficulties on your budget.
The promises that should end the conversation
Guaranteed number one on Google. Nobody can guarantee a ranking. Anyone claiming it either does not understand search or is counting on you not to.
A monthly fee, forever, with no ownership. Some are honest subscriptions. Many are a cheap site rented at a price that would have bought it outright three times over, on a platform you cannot leave. Ask what you own after two years, and ask it in writing.
No contract at all. Nothing to enforce and nothing to point at when the scope is disputed. A simple one page agreement protects you more than it protects them.
A quote without a single question about your business. The price came off a menu, not from your situation.
Fifty percent below everyone else. Usually a template with your logo dropped in, sold as bespoke. Occasionally somebody starting out and being honest about it, which is fine if they say so.
Fifty percent above everyone else with no explanation. There are good reasons for a higher price, and they are all describable. If nobody can describe them, they are not there.
About price
A useful frame rather than a number. Under about $1,500, you are buying a template with your details in it. That is a legitimate purchase for a business that needs a presence rather than a lead source, and it is worth knowing that is what you are buying.
Above that, you are paying for judgment: someone deciding what your site should say, in what order, based on how people actually buy from businesses like yours. That is the part that is hard to copy and the part that pays back.
The expensive mistake is not overpaying. It is paying twice, because the first one had to be thrown away.
The last question
Ask them what they would do if they had your budget and your business.
Anyone worth hiring has an opinion and will give it, including the parts you might not want to hear. Someone who reflects the question back and asks what you had in mind is going to build whatever you describe, and you are the one who has done this twice.
