Choosing a web developer is difficult precisely because you are hiring for something you cannot evaluate. If you could tell good code from bad, you would not need to hire anybody. So most people fall back on price, or on whoever a cousin recommended, and find out eighteen months later that the site cannot be updated without the original developer.
Here are the questions that actually separate a studio you can rely on from one you cannot. We answer these for prospects every week, so we are not neutral — but the questions work regardless of who you ask them to.
1. Who owns the code when this is finished?
The single most important question, and the one least often asked. The answer should be "you do, completely, including the source and the repository". If the answer involves a monthly licence to keep your own website running, you are renting, not buying — and the rent only ever goes one way.
2. Can I see three sites you built that are live right now?
Live URLs, not screenshots in a PDF. Then open them on your phone, on mobile data, outside. Two things you learn instantly: whether they load, and whether they were built for a phone or for the laptop the designer used.
Be gently suspicious of portfolios full of projects with impressive names and no working links. It is very common, and it is very often stock.
3. Who will actually do the work?
In a lot of arrangements the person who wins the project is not the person who builds it, and sometimes the build is passed to a third party you never meet. That is not automatically bad, but you should know, because it determines who you can call when something breaks at 9pm before a launch.
4. Where will it be hosted, and in whose account?
Hosting registered in the developer's name is the most common way businesses get held hostage. It is rarely malicious — the developer set it up on their account because it was quicker — but when the relationship ends, so does your access. Domain and hosting should be in your name, with you holding the credentials, from day one.
5. Is the quote fixed, and what makes it change?
A fixed quote is not the same as a cheap quote. What matters is that both sides know what is included. Ask specifically: how many rounds of design revisions, how many pages, and what counts as a change of scope. A studio that cannot answer that has not thought about your project yet.
6. What happens after launch?
Websites are not furniture. Software gets security updates, plugins break, hosting expires, contact forms silently stop delivering. Ask what support looks like, what it costs, and how fast they respond. "We will be there" is not an answer; "same working day, by email, included for three months" is.
7. Will I be able to update it myself?
Ask them to show you the admin panel of a site they built for someone else. If it takes them ten minutes to explain how to change a phone number, you are going to be paying them to change phone numbers.
8. What do you know about my industry?
This matters more for software than for a brochure site. A jewellery retailer's billing involves savings schemes, old-gold exchange and karigar job work — none of which a generic invoicing package models, and all of which somebody has to understand before they can build it. An agri business has landed cost, seasonal price tiers and field staff working with almost no signal. A contractor has bar bending schedules and statutory returns.
You are not looking for someone who already knows your trade. You are looking for someone who asks about it properly on the first call rather than assuming it is like every other project.
9. How do you handle the data I already have?
Every business moving to new software has years of history in spreadsheets, an old system, or paper. Migrating it is usually the slowest, least glamorous part of the project, and the part most likely to be quietly left out of a quote. Ask directly. A vendor who says "we will import it, it is fine" without looking at your files has not costed it.
10. What would you talk me out of?
Our favourite question, and the most revealing. Anyone who agrees enthusiastically with every idea you have is selling, not advising. A studio worth hiring will tell you that you do not need an app, that a marketplace is a better start than a store, or that you should buy Tally rather than commission custom accounting — because they would rather lose a line item than build something that does not work.
Two smaller signals worth watching
- Their own website. If it is slow, broken on mobile, or last updated in 2021, that is a preview of the care you will receive.
- How they write the quote. A one-line quote for a lakh of work means nobody has thought about it. Detail up front is the cheapest indicator of detail later.
And on price
The cheapest quote is almost always the most expensive one, because it is priced on the assumption that nothing will go wrong and nothing will be needed afterwards. Both assumptions are false. Pay for scope you understand, from someone who told you the truth about at least one thing you did not want to hear.
