You're about to spend somewhere between £2,000 and £20,000 on a website. You're going to interview two or three people. They'll all sound competent on a first call because that's their job — sounding competent is what gets them hired. The problem is that "sounds competent" and "will deliver a website you actually own and can maintain" are different skills.
This is the list of questions I'd ask if I were hiring me. Each one comes with what a good answer sounds like and what should make you walk away. Print it out before your next call.
1. "Who will own the code when this is done?"
You. That's the only acceptable answer. Get it in writing.
Good answer: "You own everything. The code lives in a GitHub repository under your account. I'll be added as a collaborator during the build and removed when we're done."
Bad answer: "We retain the code and license it to you for use." This is a polite way of saying you're trapped. If you ever want to switch developers, you start from scratch.
Worse answer: Vague reassurance like "don't worry, you'll have access to everything." Access isn't ownership. Push for specifics.
2. "Where will the site be hosted, and whose account is it?"
The hosting account should be in your name, paid by your card, accessible by your login. The developer can have temporary admin access during the build.
Good answer: "I'll set up a Vercel/Netlify/AWS account in your name. You'll get the login. I'll have collaborator access while we're building, and you can revoke that whenever you want."
Bad answer: "It'll be hosted on our infrastructure." This means every month for the rest of your business's life, you pay them or you lose the website. Avoid.
Worse answer: "We have our own hosting platform." Same problem, dressed up as a feature.
3. "What technology stack will you use, and why?"
You don't need to understand the tech. You need to verify the developer can explain it in plain English and that the choice is portable — meaning any other developer in the market can pick it up.
Good answer: "Next.js for the frontend, Vercel for hosting, Sanity or a similar headless CMS for content. These are mainstream tools — if you ever need to switch developers, any frontend developer in London can pick it up." (Or WordPress, or Astro, or Squarespace — what matters is the justification and the portability.)
Bad answer: "We use our proprietary CMS." You're locked in. Walk.
Worse answer: Jargon without justification — "we'll use a custom microservices architecture with serverless edge functions and a GraphQL gateway" for a five-page restaurant site. Either they're showing off or padding the bill.
4. "Can I see three examples of sites you've built that are similar to mine?"
Not their portfolio highlights. Sites for businesses like yours.
Good answer: They send three live URLs of small business sites in similar industries or scope. You can click around and see the work.
Bad answer: They send you their fanciest agency-portfolio piece for a Fortune 500 client. Beautiful, but irrelevant — those projects had teams of 12 people and £200k budgets. You need proof they can do your size of project well.
Worse answer: They can't show similar work, or only have mockups, not live sites. Either they're new (which is fine, but the price should reflect it) or they're hiding something.
5. "What's not included in your quote?"
This is the question that separates honest developers from ones who'll surprise you with a £1,400 invoice in month two.
Good answer: A specific list. "Quote includes design, build, basic on-page SEO setup, and one round of revisions per page. Not included: copywriting, photography, content migration from your old site, ongoing maintenance after launch, third-party software costs (CMS subscriptions, plugins), or domain registration."
Bad answer: "Everything's included!" It isn't. Either they haven't thought about it or they're going to surprise you.
Worse answer: Visible discomfort with the question. They know it's coming up, they just hoped you wouldn't ask.
6. "What happens if the project goes over the timeline or budget?"
Every project hits something unexpected. The question is how it gets handled.
Good answer: "I quote in fixed phases. If something genuinely outside the original scope comes up, I'll flag it before doing the work, give you a written quote for the change, and you decide whether to proceed. I never invoice for work you haven't approved."
Bad answer: "We bill hourly so it depends." Fine for some projects, but you need a ceiling. Ask for one.
Worse answer: "That doesn't really happen." It does. They're either inexperienced or hoping you don't think about it.
7. "What does maintenance look like after launch, and what does it cost?"
This is where small businesses lose the most money over time. Get the answer in writing.
Good answer: "After launch, you don't pay me anything unless you want changes. When you do, I bill at £X/hour or a flat rate per task. Most clients spend £200–£500 a year on small updates. If you want a maintenance retainer, I can do that, but most small business sites genuinely don't need one."
Bad answer: "We require a £300/month maintenance retainer." Required for what? Ask exactly what you get for that money. Most of the time, it's hosting (which you should own anyway) plus "we're available if something breaks". For a static marketing site, this is a £3,600/year tax for almost nothing.
Worse answer: A long-term contract that auto-renews and is hard to cancel. Don't sign it.
8. "How will I update content myself after launch?"
You should be able to change your menu, prices, hours, and copy without paying anyone. If you can't, you don't have a website — you have a leash.
Good answer: They show you the CMS during the demo. "Here's how you'll edit the menu — log in, click here, type, save. It's like editing a Google Doc."
Bad answer: "Just send me the changes and I'll do them." That's £80 every time you want to update your opening hours. Run.
Worse answer: "It's all hand-coded HTML." For a small business website. In 2026. No.
9. "What's your communication style and response time during the project?"
Set the expectation now or be frustrated later.
Good answer: "Email or WhatsApp during business hours, response within 24 hours weekdays. We'll have a kickoff call, a mid-project check-in, and a launch call. Outside that, we communicate as needed."
Bad answer: "We use a project management tool — you'll need to log in there for all updates." Maybe fine for a £30k project. For a £3k small business site, this is friction designed to reduce the number of times you talk to them.
Worse answer: Vague answers about "always available" without specifics. They won't be.
10. "What happens if you get sick or hit by a bus?"
Awkward question, important answer. This is the genuine risk of hiring a freelancer over an agency.
Good answer (freelancer): "Realistically, your project would pause for a week or two. The code is in your GitHub from day one, hosting is in your name, and the tech stack is mainstream — so worst case, you hand it to another developer and they pick it up. I work with a couple of other freelancers I'd refer you to in an emergency."
Good answer (agency): "We have multiple developers — your project would be reassigned internally."
Bad answer (either): "That won't happen." It might. The question isn't whether they think it'll happen, it's what the contingency is.
If you want a longer breakdown of the freelancer-vs-agency tradeoff, I covered it in detail here — including the specific cases where I'd tell you to skip a freelancer and hire an agency.
11. "Have you built sites that handle [my specific business need]?"
If you take bookings, take payments, sell products, capture leads, or integrate with anything — ask.
Good answer: "Yes — here are two live examples. The booking system uses Cal.com / SimplyBook / your-platform-of-choice. Setup takes a day, ongoing cost is £X/month, and you'll be able to manage availability yourself."
Bad answer: "We can build a custom booking system." Why would you, when £15/month off-the-shelf tools work better and have 24/7 support? This answer means a £4,000 line item that adds nothing over Cal.com.
Worse answer: "We've never done that but we can figure it out." Pay someone else to learn on someone else's project.
12. "Walk me through what the first two weeks of working together look like."
How they answer this tells you whether they have a process or are making it up as they go.
Good answer: A specific narrative. "Day 1: kickoff call, I'll send a questionnaire about your business and goals. Day 3–5: I send back wireframes for your homepage. Week 2: design mockups for the full site. You give feedback, we iterate, then I start building once design is locked."
Bad answer: "We just get started and figure it out as we go." They'll waste your time and theirs.
Worse answer: Two weeks of "discovery" and "stakeholder alignment workshops" for a five-page website. That's £3,000 of nothing on the invoice.
What to do with the answers
Send these to the two or three developers you're considering, ideally as a written email rather than verbally on a call. Three things will happen:
- —One of them won't reply at all, or will reply with vague non-answers. Take them off the list.
- —One of them will get defensive or try to handle it on a call. They don't want to put answers in writing because written commitments are enforceable. Take them off the list.
- —One of them will reply with specific, written answers within 48 hours. That's the one you hire.
The questions aren't designed to catch anyone out. They're designed to filter for people who treat your business like a serious commitment instead of a sales target. A good developer will see this list and think "great, this client knows what they're doing." A bad one will resent being asked.
The point
A £4,000 website is a small purchase compared to most business decisions, but it's a 3–5 year commitment to whoever builds it. The cost of getting it wrong isn't the £4,000 — it's the £8,000 you spend rebuilding it eighteen months later because you can't extract it from a proprietary system, can't update it yourself, or can't get hold of the developer who built it.
Asking these twelve questions takes ten minutes per developer. It will save you, on average, somewhere between £3,000 and £15,000 over the lifetime of your site.
If you want to skip the search entirely, I build websites for London small businesses and I've already answered all twelve of these questions on this page somewhere. If anything's still unclear, send me the question and I'll answer it in writing within 24 hours — same standard I'm telling you to hold everyone else to.
For pricing context before any of these conversations, my breakdown of what London small business websites actually cost is the right post to read first.
Want this as a PDF checklist to bring to your next developer call? Email me at alvaro.teran97@gmail.com with "hiring checklist" in the subject and I'll send it over — no signup, no list, just the PDF.