Most advice on how to choose a web designer was written by a web designer trying to convince you to hire them.
Including, yes, this article. I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a stake in this. But here’s the difference: what I’m about to tell you is going to help you spot a bad designer, and that applies to me too, if I’m not the right fit for what you need.
I’ve worked with small and mid-size businesses for years. Some of them found us before anything went wrong. A lot of them found us after. And after hearing the same stories enough times, there’s a clear pattern to how things go bad. It almost never starts with something dramatic. It starts with small things you didn’t know to ask about. Knowing how to choose a web designer well comes down to knowing what those things are before you sign anything.
Here’s what to watch for:
- You were never given a real project timeline
- The designer stopped communicating mid-project
- The finished site didn’t feel like your business
- You have no idea how your site is performing right now
- You paid less than you expected and got less than you needed
If any of those landed, keep reading.
What Clients Tell Us When They’ve Been Burned by a Bad Web Designer
It usually sounds like this: they hired someone who seemed capable, paid a deposit, and then the communication slowly fell apart. Deadlines came and went. Questions went unanswered or got vague responses. The designer made decisions without explaining them, and by the time the site was delivered, it didn’t match what the client had asked for. It didn’t feel like their brand. Nobody explained why any of it was built the way it was.
The other version is just as common. A client sits across from me and I ask them whether they have Google Analytics set up, whether their Search Console is connected, whether they can see what searches are actually bringing people to their site. Most of the time the answer is no. Their previous designer never set any of that up. So this business owner has been running a website for months, sometimes years, with no visibility into whether it’s doing anything at all.
That’s not a minor detail to forget. Knowing how your site is performing is the entire reason you have a website.
What We Find Under the Hood When a Site’s Been Poorly Built
When a client comes to us with an existing site and gives us access to the backend, there’s a pattern I’ve seen so many times it’s almost predictable.
No real SEO structure. Every page on your site should have exactly one H1, which is the main heading that tells Google what that page is about. When there are multiple on the same page, Google doesn’t know which one to trust. That’s like putting two front doors on a building and then being confused when visitors can’t figure out where to go. Beyond that: heading tags in the wrong order, pages with no meta descriptions, images with no alt text. None of it catastrophic on its own, but all of it adding up to a site that Google isn’t taking seriously.
Then there are the plugins. I’ve seen WordPress sites with 40 or more installed, most of them inactive, some of them years out of date, a few of them doing the same job as something already built into the theme. Every plugin is a potential security vulnerability. 96% of hacked WordPress sites are compromised through vulnerable plugins, and every unnecessary one adds load to a site that’s probably already slow. A developer who knows what they’re doing figures out how to build things cleanly. One who doesn’t adds a plugin every time they hit a wall.
And then there are the dead pages. Old pages still live and indexed that haven’t been relevant in years. Broken links pointing nowhere. No redirects set up when pages were removed, so visitors land on error pages instead. Nobody’s been watching the site since launch. Nobody ever planned to.
The business owner looks at the front of the site and it looks fine. But Google is seeing all of it. And a slow, messy site loses business in ways that are easy to dismiss because you never see who left. Research from HubSpot shows that conversion rates can drop by more than half as load time increases from one second to five. That math adds up fast when your site is supposed to be generating leads.
Red Flags to Watch for When Choosing a Web Designer
The price seems unusually low.
Before you start talking to anyone, it helps to have a realistic sense of what a professional website should actually cost. If someone quotes you an entire website for $800, ask yourself what that actually buys. A designer has to make a living. At that price point, they’re either building something generic enough to apply to any business in any industry, sending the work offshore to a team the client will never meet, or skipping the things you can’t see: SEO structure, site speed, and clean backend setup.
This isn’t about expensive being better. It’s about understanding that a good website takes real time and real expertise. A price that seems too good to be true usually means something is missing from the work.
They can’t give you a real timeline.
Not “it usually takes about six weeks.” An actual breakdown. Week one, we do this. Week two, you review this. Here’s when we need your feedback, and here’s the delivery date. If a designer can’t describe how the project runs before it starts, they don’t have a process. And without a process, there’s nothing keeping the project on track when something comes up.
They start talking about design before they understand your business.
The first conversation with a good designer should involve a lot of questions. What does your business do? Who are your customers? What does the site actually need to accomplish? If someone is already talking about what your site will look like before they’ve asked any of that, they’re working from their own instincts instead of your goals. That’s how you end up with a site that looks fine and doesn’t convert anyone.
There’s no real proposal.
A serious designer sends a detailed proposal before any work begins. Not a one-paragraph email with a number at the bottom. A document that lays out the scope, the pricing, the timeline with specific weekly deliverables, what’s included, what isn’t, and what happens if something falls outside the original agreement. Without that in writing, you have no protection when things go sideways.
They’re not upfront about what else you’ll need to pay for.
Hosting, the page builder, any third-party plugins required for specific features. If these exist, you should know before you sign anything. A designer who doesn’t bring this up upfront will leave you with an unexpected bill after you’ve already committed to the project. Any legitimate agency discloses all third-party costs during the discovery phase, not at the end.
The Question Almost Nobody Thinks to Ask
Who is actually doing the work?
It sounds obvious. It isn’t. There are agencies that manage client relationships, take payment, and send everything offshore to a team you’ll never meet. And the way you find out is usually not great.
We had a client come to us after exactly this situation. They’d been working with a designer, making change requests, getting told everything was handled. Then they started noticing things. A design element they’d already approved suddenly looked different, a section they hadn’t touched had new text with a misspelling in it, and something that was fixed in the last round was somehow wrong again. The explanation from their designer was always vague.
What was actually happening: their designer was relaying requests to someone else, who was relaying them to someone else, and somewhere in that chain things were getting lost, changed, or misunderstood. By the time they came to us, they’d lost months and had a site that looked like three different people had built it in rotation. Because three different people had.
Ask directly when you’re choosing a web designer: will you personally be doing this work, or does it go to someone else? A straight answer sounds like: I handle this, and if I bring in a contractor for a specific piece, it’s someone I’ve worked with and trust. If the answer is vague or if they seem annoyed by the question, that’s useful information.
What to Do If You’re Already in This Situation
Not everyone reading this is doing research before they hire. Some people are here because something is already going wrong.
The most common version is you hired someone with a clear vision in mind, and what keeps coming back doesn’t look anything like it. The designer keeps doing things their own way, deadlines get pushed with a new excuse each time, and you’ve had the same feedback conversation so many times you’re not sure whether to push through or just cut your losses.
A few things to do right now.
Make sure you own your domain. It should be registered in your name, in your own account, not your designer’s. The same goes for your hosting. These belong to you regardless of what stage the project is in.
Ask for all the files created so far. Any professional will hand these over without resistance. If there’s pushback, that tells you something important about what happens if things escalate further.
Then decide honestly: is the communication problem fixable with one direct conversation, or has the pattern repeated enough times that it isn’t going to change? A designer who isn’t listening after multiple rounds usually doesn’t start. That’s not cynical, it’s just what we’ve seen.
If you do need to start over, it’s not always from scratch. We’ve taken over projects mid-stream and found work worth keeping. Whether something is worth salvaging or needs to come down depends on a separate set of questions. Copy, design decisions, site structure. Not everything has to go.
What a Good Process Actually Looks Like
Here’s the baseline you should hold any designer to when choosing a web designer, before you agree to anything.
You should get a detailed proposal in writing before work starts. Not a ballpark in an email. An actual document: scope, pricing, a week-by-week breakdown of deliverables, and any third-party costs that might come up. No surprises at the end.
You should see a design direction before development begins. A mockup of the homepage and at least one internal page, reviewed and approved by you, before anyone has built anything. The time to say “this isn’t what I had in mind” is at the start, not after six weeks of work.
Analytics should be set up and working before the site goes live. Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Tag Manager. You should be able to log in after launch and see how people are finding your site, what they’re looking at, and whether the traffic is growing. If a designer launches your site without setting this up, ask why. There’s no good answer.
And after launch, the designer should still pick up the phone. Not through a ticketing system with a five-day response window. Actually reachable. A site you build is something you stand behind.
None of this is above and beyond. It’s what a professional process looks like.
If you want to see how we handle this from start to finish, get in touch here. We’re happy to walk you through it.
