I get a fair number of enquiries that start the same way: "My last web person disappeared," or "I paid a lot and I can't even edit my own site." By then the money's spent and the trust is gone.
Hiring a web designer is hard because you're buying something you can't fully judge until it's too late. You can't see the code. You don't know what's normal. So you go on gut, and gut gets it wrong.
Here are the warning signs I'd watch for. Not to scare you off hiring someone, most designers are decent, but to help you spot the ones who'll cost you.
"It depends" is a fair answer to a vague question. But once you've described what you need, a good designer can give you a fixed price or a tight range. Someone who insists on hourly with no cap, and won't estimate the total, is protecting themselves at your expense.
Ask for a fixed price for a defined scope. If they can't or won't, that tells you something. I break down what UK websites actually cost in this post so you've got a number to sanity-check against.
Ask a simple question: "Where will my website be hosted, and can I have access?" If the answer is a shrug, or worse, a vague "don't worry, I handle all that," worry.
You should know where your site lives, own the account or have full access to it, and be able to leave if you want to. Designers who keep hosting deliberately murky do it so you can't take your site elsewhere. That's not a service, it's a hostage situation.
For a lot of small businesses, being able to change your own opening hours, prices, or a bit of text is the difference between a site that stays current and one that rots. If every tiny change means an invoice, you'll stop making changes.
Ask directly: "Can I update the text and images myself without coding?" A good answer is either a proper content dashboard or an honest "this build is designed to be edited, here's how." If updating a phone number means paying them each time, know that going in.
Who owns the website when it's done? The design, the code, the domain, the content. The answer should be: you do. Outright.
Some designers keep you on a lease you don't realise you signed. You pay monthly, and the day you stop, the site vanishes because it was never yours. There are honest subscription models, but they should be labelled as such and explained clearly. If ownership gets vague, push until it isn't.
Ongoing support is a real thing and worth paying for. Hosting, updates, backups, someone on call. But it should be a rolling arrangement you can leave, not a twelve-month lock-in.
Be wary of anyone who needs you tied in for a year before they'll start. Confident people who do good work don't need to trap clients. My own services are fixed-price and month-to-month for support, because if the work's good you'll stay by choice.
A "premium SEO package," a "social media booster," a "security suite." Upsells dressed up as essentials. Some are useful. Many are padding, sold because the margins are good, not because you need them.
A straight answer sounds like "you need hosting and a domain, the rest is optional and here's what each thing actually does." If you're being sold a bundle of extras before anyone's understood your business, that's a sales process, not a design one.
Anyone can make a pretty screenshot. Ask to see a live site they've built, then run it through pagespeed.web.dev yourself while you're on the call. If their own portfolio pieces load slowly or score badly on mobile, that's what you'll be getting too.
Speed is one of the few quality signals you can check without any technical knowledge. Use it. A designer proud of their work will happily watch you test it.
If a designer can't explain what they're doing in plain English, one of two things is true: they don't understand it well enough themselves, or they're using complexity to keep you dependent. Neither is good.
You should leave every conversation understanding a little more, not a little more confused. A good designer translates. A bad one hides behind the words.
Even a simple one-page agreement protects you both. What's included, what it costs, when it's done, who owns what, what happens if it goes wrong. Someone who wants to skip all that entirely is a risk. So is someone whose contract quietly claims your domain, your content, or the right to hold your site until final payment on unclear terms.
Read it. If anything about ownership or cancellation feels off, ask before you sign, not after.
Read that back and you'll notice the theme. Every red flag is really about the same thing: control and honesty. A good designer gives you control, explains things plainly, charges a fair fixed price, and hands you a site you own.
None of it requires you to understand code. It requires you to ask a handful of direct questions and watch how comfortable the answers are. The right person welcomes them. The wrong one gets slippery.
If you've been burned before, or you just want a second opinion on a quote you've been given, tell me about it. I'll give you an honest read, even if the honest answer is that you should go with someone else.
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
A new post every week on owning your website, ditching builder fees, and ranking on Google. Plain English, no spam, unsubscribe whenever.
Your next step
You do not need a technical brief. Tell me where you are stuck and what you want the website to do better. I'll reply with a useful next step.