What to Ask Before You
Hire a Web Designer for
Your Contracting Business

Hiring a web designer is one of the riskier vendor relationships a small business can enter. The deliverable is intangible, the timeline is open-ended, the quality is subjective, and the consequences of getting it wrong take months to become apparent. Most contractors who've had a bad web design experience didn't know what to ask before they signed. This guide fixes that.

I'm going to give you the honest list — the questions I'd want a prospect to ask me, because the answers reveal everything about how a web designer thinks about their work.

Question 1: "Who owns the accounts?"

This is the first question and the most important. When your web designer builds your site, whose Netlify account is it on? Whose Google Analytics? Whose email marketing platform? Whose domain registrar?

If the answer is "mine" — meaning the designer's — you have a structural problem. If that designer goes out of business, decides to raise prices dramatically, or has a falling out with you, you may not have straightforward access to your own website. You're a tenant, not an owner.

The correct answer is: every account is in your name, you hold the login credentials, and the designer is added as a collaborator or administrator. You own the asset. The designer maintains access as a service, not as a gatekeeper.

Question 2: "What happens to my site if I stop paying you?"

Related to the above, but different. This is about continuity. If your relationship with the designer ends — for any reason — what state is your site in? Is it portable? Can another designer pick it up? Is it on a platform you could manage yourself if needed?

A site built on a proprietary page builder that only the original designer knows how to operate is a hostage situation. A site built on standard web technologies in your own account is an asset you can take anywhere.

Question 3: "Can I see examples of sites you've built for other contractors in my trade?"

Not just web design portfolio pieces — contractor sites, specifically. A designer who has built five plumber sites understands the specific conversion problems of a plumbing website: emergency response CTAs, service area confirmation, trust-building for someone letting a stranger into their home. A designer who's never worked in the trades will approach those problems with guesses rather than experience.

If they show you examples and the sites look like digital business cards — clean but quiet, credible but unconvincing — ask the follow-up: "Do you have any data on how these sites performed? Call volume changes, ranking improvements, lead form conversions?"

Question 4: "What is your process for understanding my business before you start designing?"

A web designer who starts with the visual — "what colors do you like, what's your logo, do you want a dark or light background" — is building something decorative. A web designer who starts with the business — "what does your best customer look like, what objection do you hear most often, what do you do that your competitors don't" — is building something functional.

The right answer involves a discovery process before any design begins. It involves questions about your market, your competition, your customers, and what you want someone to do after they've seen your site. If a designer jumps straight to templates and color palettes, the resulting website will look like it was built without understanding what it needed to do.

Question 5: "What does 'maintenance' include?"

Most contractors are sold a monthly maintenance retainer as part of a web design package. Most of those retainers are priced for the work involved in keeping a site technically functional — security updates, backups, uptime monitoring. That's not strategic value. That's overhead.

The question is whether the maintenance relationship includes strategic work — quarterly content updates based on seasonal demand, offer refinement as your business evolves, analytics review and conversion rate optimization. A retainer worth paying for is one that makes your site progressively more effective over time, not one that just keeps it from breaking.

Question 6: "How do you handle SEO?"

Be careful with this question because the answers will vary wildly and some of them are misleading. "We submit your site to Google" is not SEO. "We install an SEO plugin" is table stakes, not a strategy. "We build your page titles, meta descriptions, header structure, and local business schema based on keyword research for your specific trade and market" is a start.

For contractor websites, local SEO is the primary objective. Ranking for "plumber Chattanooga" or "HVAC repair near me" is more valuable than ranking for national terms. Ask specifically: "What will you do to help my site appear when someone in my city searches for my trade?"

Question 7: "Do you work with other contractors in my trade in my market?"

This one matters more than most contractors think to ask. A designer who builds websites for multiple plumbing companies in the same city has a structural conflict of interest. The strategies, the offer framing, the keyword targeting — if they're doing the same work for your direct competitor, the advantage they bring you is diluted at best, eliminated at worst.

Exclusivity by trade and market is a meaningful differentiator — and it's one of the few commitments in this industry that's genuinely worth paying for.

The Red Flags

A few things that should stop any contractor from signing:

• No portfolio of contractor sites specifically — general web design experience doesn't translate directly to trade business conversion problems
• Vague or evasive answers about account ownership — this is a foundational question with a clear right answer; vagueness is a bad sign
• Promises of specific Google rankings within a specific timeframe — nobody can guarantee search rankings; anyone who does is either uninformed or dishonest
• A process that starts with design before discovery — the visual should follow the strategy, not lead it
• Lock-in to proprietary platforms without clear exit terms — you should be able to take your site elsewhere if the relationship ends