11 questions to ask before you hire anyone to build your website

Ask about ownership before you ask about price. If the person quoting cannot say plainly whose name your domain will be registered in, and what you keep if you leave, the rest of the quote is decoration. The other 10 questions sort the field on scope, risk and running cost.

Fair warning about the source: we build websites, so we are among the options you would be interviewing, and we have answered questions 7 and 11 with our own answer rather than pretending to be neutral.

The 11 questions at a glance

The right column is a red flag, not a difference of opinion.

Questions 1, 2 and 8: who ends up holding the asset

Question 1: who owns the domain, the code and the content?

The domain is the part that cannot be replaced. A site can be rebuilt in a week, but a domain carrying years of Google history, printed on your van and on every invoice you have sent, is leverage when it sits in somebody else’s name.

Worth hearing: the registrar named, an offer to put you on that account or transfer it to your own, and an agreement saying the code, the copy and the photos are yours from day 1.

Walk on: “it lives on our platform”, or a domain registered under the builder’s ABN because it was easier at setup. Checking who owns your website covers how to verify each piece.

Question 2: what happens if I leave?

Exit terms are the most reliable confidence signal in the whole conversation. Ask what transfers, how long it takes, and what stops working the day you stop paying.

Worth hearing: a written offboarding. The domain moves to a registrar account you control, you receive the content, and somebody else can host the code without rebuilding it.

Walk on: no cancellation clause at all, or vague reassurance on a proprietary platform, where the honest answer is that the site stops existing and you start from a blank page.

Question 8: do you host it, and where?

Hosting decides how fast the site loads for a customer standing in a driveway on a phone, who can reach the files, and whether last week’s version survives a bad edit.

Worth hearing: the host named, the country it is served from, a backup frequency, and whether hosting sits inside the monthly fee or is resold to you beside it.

Walk on: “our servers”, with nothing named. Ours runs from Sydney with SSL, daily backups and uptime monitoring inside the monthly fee, which is the detail the question should produce.

Questions 3, 4 and 5: what you are actually buying

Question 3: who writes the copy?

Copy is the item quotes skip and projects die on. Builds stall waiting on words far more often than on a layout, and the words are what Google reads.

Worth hearing: either “we write it from an intake and you approve every page”, or “you write it, here is the brief, the word counts and the date”. Both work. Not knowing which you agreed to is what does the damage.

Walk on: a plan to launch on placeholder text and fix it later. Placeholder copy goes live and stays live.

Question 4: how many pages, which ones, and why those?

Page count is a vanity number. Purpose is the question, and every page should map to something a customer types into Google or a decision they need help making.

Worth hearing: the page names and the reason for each, before any total. On SmartChoice SA in Adelaide, domestic, office, end of lease, school and commercial cleaning became 5 pages rather than a services list, because they are 5 searches made by 5 buyers.

Walk on: “a 5-page website” with no pages named, or a proposal promising 40 suburb pages from a template. This site ran that experiment on itself. Of 90 URLs, 63 came from template functions, 2 shared 80.4% of their 7-word phrase sequences once rendered, and 49 had never served an impression in Google. What remains is 36 pages written by hand.

Question 5: what SEO is included, and what is not?

The phrase covers everything between a filled-in title tag and a monthly campaign with a budget, so ask for the list. A specific answer names most of these:

• A title tag and meta description per page, not generated from the business name
• Heading structure, and internal links between the pages
• Schema markup for the business, the services and the FAQs
• An XML sitemap, a robots file, and the site verified in Search Console with analytics recording
• Load speed measured on a mid-range Android phone, not a desktop
• The Google Business Profile pointed at the right pages

Walk on: “SEO optimised” with nothing itemised and no exclusions stated. Link acquisition, ongoing content and ad management are usually separate. Our build is SEO-ready at launch and the monthly fee keeps it hosted, secure and edited, which is not an ongoing SEO campaign, and our pricing page says that plainly.

Questions 6 and 10: what living with it costs

Question 6: how do I request a change, and how fast?

This decides whether the site still says the right thing in year 2. Sites go stale because changing them is awkward, not because anybody decided to stop. Ask through what channel, on what turnaround, and where the line sits between an edit and new work.

Worth hearing: a channel and a number. Requests here go through a client portal on a 3 business day turnaround, with edits inside the monthly fee rather than quoted job by job.

Walk on: “just text me”, where nothing is logged, or hourly billing with a minimum, where changing a phone number bills an hour.

Question 10: what does year 2 cost?

Build price is the number everyone negotiates. Running cost decides how the website is remembered. Ask for a total across 24 months covering hosting, domain renewal, SSL, licence renewals, edits and any retainer.

Worth hearing: a single figure you can multiply out. Australian prices we checked on 3 August 2026 show the spread. Tradie Web Guys sits at $5,600 and WebApex quotes $7,500 for trades and construction. The Free Tradie Website Crew runs $79 a month, and Andrew Boddy $59 a month plus a Squarespace subscription the client pays separately. A conventional agency lands around $3,000 to $10,000 upfront plus $500 to $2,000 a month. Ours is $0 upfront and $297 a month including GST on a 12-month subscription, which is $3,564 across the year.

Walk on: a build price quoted precisely, with the ongoing cost left for later.

Questions 7 and 11: risk, and who is carrying it

Question 7: what is your guarantee, and is it in writing?

A guarantee that exists only in a sales conversation is a sentence, not a term. Ask to read the clause and check 4 things: what triggers it, what counts, what the remedy is, and who decides it has been met.

Walk on: “satisfaction guaranteed”, which commits to nothing measurable, or a promise of position on Google, which nobody controls. Our answer:

If your website has not produced a lead from SEO within the first 90 days, you stop paying us until it does. There is no refund, and we do not promise rankings.

A qualified lead is defined rather than argued about later: a unique inbound call of 60 seconds or longer, or a completed contact or quote form. Friends, family, existing customers, suppliers, sales calls, spam and paid-ads traffic are excluded, because counting those clears the guarantee in week 1 without the website doing anything. It is on our guarantee page and inside the agreement we publish, beside a second written term: the build takes 5 working days from intake, and missing it means no monthly fee for the first 12 months.

Question 11: what happens if it does not work?

Everyone says it will work. The useful question is what changes about your invoice if it does not, since that is the only part of the answer that costs the person saying it anything.

Walk on: “we’ll keep optimising”, free labour of unknown value, or “SEO takes 6 to 12 months”, true and also a way of never being wrong.

Our answer: No leads from SEO in your first 90 days and you stop paying until one arrives. Billing resumes the day the first qualified lead arrives, and paused months are never invoiced back afterwards. Through a pause we keep hosting, monitoring and actioning portal requests at our own cost. We do not offer refunds, and we do not promise a position or a date.

Question 9: will you show me a site you built that ranks today?

A portfolio proves somebody can produce a screenshot. Ranking is checkable in under a minute on your own phone. Ask for a live URL and the term it appears for, type it in yourself rather than watching on their laptop, and ask what that site was doing beforehand.

Walk on: mock-ups, a logo wall, a case study marked coming soon, or a client list with nothing clickable in it.

Worth hearing, and our answer: live client sites listed with real URLs, every result attached to the client it happened to. Underpinning Sydney reached top 3 for “underpinning Sydney”. Adelaide’s Bathroom Network began ranking inside 8 weeks. Lucky Duck Mowing took a quote request 28 minutes after launch, from Tony in Dicky Beach with a rear duplex lawn under 100sqm. Shakin Entertainment booked an enquiry the Monday after a Friday launch, replacing a Square-built site with Domain Rating 0, a single ranking keyword (its own brand) and no organic traffic. Those sit in our case studies.

The order to ask them in

Questions 1, 2 and 8 come first, because a bad answer there ends the conversation whatever the price says. Questions 7 and 11 come next, since they tell you who is carrying the risk. Question 9 is third and the fastest to verify. The rest are scope, and scope is negotiable once the first 6 answers are sound.

Ask by email and keep the replies. Written answers can be compared across quotes and are the ones you can hold somebody to. A question that comes back unanswered twice has been answered.

Ask us the same 11

The same standard applies here. Ownership transfers on day 1 under the published agreement, edits run through the portal on a 3 business day turnaround, and the price is a single line on the pricing page. We take 4 builds a month, 3 slots are open, and everything runs by email and through the portal, which is the cost structure making a $0 build possible.