What to ask before hiring a web design company

A website touches most of how a service business is discovered and booked. In BrightLocal's 2019 survey of 500 U.S. consumers, 76 percent said they look at local business websites at least half the time when choosing a business, and only 8 percent never look. The same survey found 91 percent would be put off by at least one common website issue, such as poorly written content or missing prices.

Most problems with web projects trace back to expectations that were never written down: who owns what, what is included, how long it takes and what happens after launch. The questions below are grouped so they can be asked in a single conversation and answered in a written proposal.

Start here, because it is the hardest thing to fix later. The domain should be registered in the business's name, with the business holding its own login. ICANN's Transfer Policy requires a registrar to provide the authorization code for a domain transfer within five calendar days of a request, but that right belongs to the registrant on record, so the record needs to be the business.

Copyright needs the same care. The U.S. Copyright Office's Circular 30, revised in 2024, explains that commissioned work by an independent creator is a work made for hire only in specific categories and only with a signed written agreement that says so. Without one, the creator generally owns the copyright. Ask for a written assignment or license of the content and design.

• Will the domain be registered in the business's name?
• Will the business have admin access to the domain, hosting and analytics?
• Will the contract assign rights in the content and design to the business?
• If the business changes providers, what files and data does it receive, and in what format?

Ask for the steps from first call to launch, what the company needs from the business at each step, and the timeline for each. A clear process names who writes the content, who supplies photos, how many rounds of review are included and who approves the final version.

Ask what delays a project most often. A direct answer, such as waiting on content or approvals, is a good sign. It shows the company knows where projects slip.

• What are the steps, and how long does each take?
• What does the business need to supply, and by when?
• Who writes the page content?
• How many rounds of revisions are included?
• How is the site tested before it goes live?

Ask how speed is measured, not just whether the site will be fast. Google's Core Web Vitals, published on web.dev, set specific thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads.

Ask to see these results for sites the company has already built, on mobile as well as desktop. StatCounter reports that mobile devices made up 49.1 percent of U.S. web traffic in September 2026, so a site that is only tested on a desktop screen is tested for about half its visitors.

Ask which accessibility standard the company builds to and how it tests. The U.S. Department of Justice guidance on ADA.gov, published in March 2022, states that businesses open to the public are covered by Title III of the ADA and that the Department's position is that these requirements extend to goods and services offered on the web.

The issues are common. WebAIM's 2026 analysis of one million home pages detected WCAG failures on 95.9 percent of them. The most frequent were low contrast text, missing image alternative text and missing form labels. Ask how the company checks for these before launch and after content changes.

A website needs ongoing updates. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, with 91 percent in plugins. It also found that about half of high-impact vulnerabilities were exploited within 24 hours.

Ask who applies updates and how often, where backups are stored and how long a restore takes, who monitors uptime, and how fast someone responds if the site goes down. If the answer is that the business will handle it after launch, plan for that work before signing.

• Who applies software and plugin updates, and how often?
• Where are backups stored, and how often are restores tested?
• Who is alerted if the site goes down, and how fast do they respond?
• How are change requests submitted, and how quickly are they completed?

Ask what will be reported and how often. Traffic alone does not show whether the site produces customers. A useful report includes calls from the site, form submissions and bookings, along with uptime and speed.

Ask how calls and forms are tracked, where submissions go, and how quickly someone is notified. A form that sends to an unchecked inbox produces no customers, no matter how good the site looks.

Every answer above should appear in the proposal or contract, not only in conversation. Read the scope carefully for what is excluded as well as what is included.

• Ownership of domain, content, design and data
• Scope: pages, features, integrations and content writing
• Timeline and what the business must supply
• Speed and accessibility standards and how they are tested
• Ongoing updates, backups, monitoring and response times
• Change request process and turnaround
• Reporting: what is measured and how often
• Exit terms: what the business receives and how quickly