What to Ask Before You Hire a Web Developer
Most business owners do not know what to ask, so they compare prices instead of outcomes. Here are the questions that actually reveal who you are dealing with.
Hiring a developer is uncomfortable because you are buying something you cannot inspect. You can look at a car before you buy it. You cannot look at code and know whether it will still work in three years.
So most people fall back on the one number they do understand, which is price. That is how a business ends up with a website that cost very little and delivered exactly that.
Ask this first: who will actually write my code? Agencies often sell you a conversation with a senior person and then hand the work to whoever is free. You want a name, and you want to meet them before you sign anything.
Then ask what happens if you want to leave. The honest answer is that you get everything, immediately, with no argument. If the reply involves a monthly fee to keep your own site running, you are not buying a website. You are renting one.
Ask how fast the site will be, and insist on a number. Not fast. Not optimised. A number, on a 4G connection, measured after launch. Anyone who cannot commit to a figure has not thought about it, and you will find out the hard way.
Ask to see something they built two years ago, not two months ago. New work always looks good. Work that has survived two years of updates, content changes and browser releases tells you whether they build things properly.
Finally, ask what happens when it breaks, because it will. Who do you call, how quickly do they answer, and is any of that written down. A developer who has thought about failure is a developer who has shipped real things.
None of these questions are technical. You do not need to understand code to ask them, and the answers will tell you more than any portfolio.