What to Look for When Hiring a Web Designer for Your Local Business

Most people hire a web designer by looking at their portfolio and choosing the one whose work looks the best. That's a reasonable starting point, but portfolio aesthetics are a poor predictor of business results. Here's what actually matters when you're hiring someone to build the site that generates your leads.

Portfolio: look for results, not just looks

A strong portfolio shows work that's live, fast, and ranking. Before hiring anyone, take the URLs from their portfolio and run them through pagespeed.web.dev. If their recent work consistently scores below 70 on mobile, their sites look good in screenshots but underperform in production.

Ask whether any of their past clients have seen ranking improvements or lead increases they can attribute to the new site. Most designers can't answer this question, which tells you they haven't been measuring outcomes — only building sites.

Do they understand local SEO, or just design?

A local business website has one job: get found by the right people and convert them into calls or form submissions. That requires SEO structure — title tags, H1 headings, location pages, schema markup, Google Business Profile connection — that has nothing to do with how the site looks.

Ask specifically: "How do you handle title tags and meta descriptions for each page?" and "Do you build location-specific pages for the towns I serve?" A designer who's been doing this correctly will answer immediately and specifically. One who hasn't will give a vague answer or say "we handle SEO separately."

SEO isn't separate from the build — it's embedded in the structure. A site built without SEO considerations requires significant rework to fix later.

Performance scores on real projects

Ask for the PageSpeed scores on two or three of their recent projects. Any web designer worth hiring can pull this up immediately from their portfolio — they should be monitoring these scores as a matter of course.

Target scores: 80+ on mobile, 90+ on desktop. Below 70 on mobile is a problem. Below 60 is a significant problem. If the designer you're considering can't name specific scores or gets defensive about the question, that's information.

Ownership: who controls what after launch?

This is the question most business owners don't ask until it causes a problem. Before hiring anyone, get clear answers to:

• Who owns the domain? (It should be registered to you, not the designer.)
• Who controls the hosting account?
• Do you own the code, or is it tied to a platform you'd have to pay to keep?
• If the relationship ends, can you take the site to another developer?

Any designer who can't give you clear, unequivocal "you own all of it" answers to these questions is building your digital property on a foundation you don't control.

Ongoing support: what happens after launch?

Websites aren't finished when they launch. You'll need new service pages, updated photos, copy changes, and technical updates. The question is whether you're paying hourly (expensive, creates hesitation to ask for changes), included in a monthly retainer (predictable, encourages you to actually use it), or abandoned (free but useless).

A good ongoing relationship looks like: a flat monthly rate, a clear scope of what's included (content updates, security patches, hosting, backups), and a response time commitment for when you have requests. Anything with an hourly billing component creates a dynamic where you second-guess every small update.

Red flags to watch for

• "We'll handle SEO after the site launches": SEO has to be built into the structure from the beginning. This phrase means SEO will be an add-on upsell, not an integrated part of the build.
• No mention of performance or speed: If a designer talks entirely about aesthetics and doesn't bring up load time or PageSpeed scores, they're optimizing for portfolio screenshots, not business results.
• Template-heavy portfolio: If all their sites look suspiciously similar, they're reskinning the same template. That's not custom design.
• No process documentation: "We'll figure it out as we go" is not a process. Ask for a project timeline with specific milestones.
• Locking you into a proprietary platform: Some designers build on platforms that they maintain exclusively. If they disappear, your site becomes unsupported.

The questions to ask on your first call

1. What's the PageSpeed mobile score on your last three builds?
2. Who owns the domain and hosting after launch?
3. How do you handle local SEO — title tags, location pages, schema?
4. What's your revision process and how many rounds are included?
5. What's the fastest you've delivered a comparable project?
6. What does ongoing support look like, and what's included in the monthly fee?

A designer who answers these questions confidently, specifically, and without hedging is someone who's been thinking about business outcomes, not just design. That's who you want building your site.

If you'd like to see how we answer these questions, start a conversation with us. We're happy to share live performance scores from our recent work and walk through our full process on a free call.