Search for a web designer in Surrey and you'll get agencies in Guildford with glass offices, freelancers like me, and a wall of companies that could be anywhere. Quotes for the same brief can come back anywhere from £500 to £15,000, and the proposals all use the same words.
The price isn't the useful signal. The answers to these seven questions are. I build websites for a living, so I have a horse in this race, but every question below is one I'd ask on your behalf before you gave anyone money. Including me.
One thing before we start: this is written for businesses ready to invest properly in their site. My builds start at £900, and most decent freelancers in Surrey are in that territory or above. If that's not where you are yet, no judgement, but a £99 template will serve you better than a cheap custom build that cuts corners.
The most important question, and the one almost nobody asks.
Plenty of designers build on platforms where you're renting. Others host the site themselves and hold it hostage: stop paying the monthly fee and the site vanishes. I've picked up the pieces for businesses who discovered, three years in, that "their" website was never theirs.
The answer you want: you own the domain, the files, and the content, and you can take all three elsewhere whenever you like. If the answer involves hesitation or the word "licence", keep looking.
An estimate is an opening bid. Day-rate projects have a way of finding extra days, and by the time the invoice grows, you're too far in to walk away.
Ask directly: if this takes longer than you expect, who pays? A designer confident in their scoping will give you one fixed number and stand behind it. That's how I quote, and it's not generosity. It's the only pricing that puts the risk on the person who controls the work.
Anyone can show you pretty screenshots. Ask for proof the sites actually perform: real PageSpeed scores, mobile load times, what happened to enquiries after launch.
Run their portfolio sites through PageSpeed Insights yourself. It's free and takes two minutes per site. A designer whose own work scores 40 on mobile is telling you something their proposal won't. One of my rescue jobs came from a business whose agency-built site took 8.4 seconds to load. It runs at 0.8 now. The agency had never mentioned speed once.
At agencies, the person who charms you in the pitch meeting is rarely the person writing the code. Sometimes the work goes to a junior. Sometimes it goes offshore and gets marked up 400%.
Neither is automatically bad, but you should know what you're paying for. Ask to meet the person doing the work. With a freelancer this question answers itself, which is a genuine advantage: the person who scoped your project is the person who has to make good on it.
Launch day isn't the end, it's the start. You'll want to update prices, swap photos, add a page.
So ask: can I edit it myself, or do I come back to you? If I come back to you, at what rate, and how fast? Some agencies charge £90 an hour with a two-week turnaround for changing a phone number. If you'll edit often, you want a CMS build with a dashboard you control. If the site rarely changes, paying for occasional updates is fine. What you don't want is finding out the policy after you've signed.
Every quote has edges. The expensive surprises live outside them.
Copywriting, photography, logo files, hosting, the domain, email, SEO setup, GDPR cookie consent: any of these can be quietly excluded. A £2,000 quote that excludes all of them can cost more than a £3,000 quote that includes the lot. Get the exclusions in writing before you compare numbers, or you're comparing different products.
Not romantic, but neither is a prenup, and this one costs nothing.
The right answer: your domain stays registered in your name (check this, it's abused constantly), you get all the files, and hosting transfers without drama. If a designer controls your domain, they control your business's front door. I register domains in the client's name from day one because I've seen what happens when it goes the other way.
Rough market shape, from someone in it: freelancers in Surrey run about £900–£3,000 for most business sites. Agencies in Guildford and Woking usually start around £3,000 and climb past £10,000, and part of that gap is their office and account managers rather than your website.
More expensive isn't automatically better, and cheap is often the most expensive option of all. What matters is getting straight answers to the seven questions above, in writing, before any money moves.
My answers to all seven live on the web design in Surrey page, and I've written about the red flags to watch for separately. If you'd rather skip ahead, tell me about your project and I'll reply within 24 hours with an honest take, including whether you need me at all.
Federica is a web designer in Surrey. She builds fast, fixed-price websites that clients own outright, and writes about it here. More about her
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