Before you hire a web developer, do your homework. Not just looking at their portfolio on their own website. Actually investigating whether the sites they have built do anything useful for the businesses that paid for them.
A site that looks good in a screenshot and a site that generates leads are not the same thing. A lot of web developers can produce the first and very few consistently produce the second. Your job before hiring is to figure out which category you are dealing with.
Do the Sites They Built Actually Rank?
Ask the developer for three to five examples of sites they built for local service businesses. Then go look at those businesses in Google. Search the main terms they would want to rank for. Are they showing up in the map pack? Are they on page one for their city and service combination?
If a developer built a roofing company's website two years ago and that roofing company still does not rank for anything, that is information. You can be polite about it, but do not ignore it. A well-built site for a local business should be producing search visibility within a reasonable timeframe. If it is not, either the site is technically weak, or the developer did not build it with search in mind.
You can also run those sites through a free tool like the scanner at focusai.us/scanner/scan to get an objective read on their technical performance. Speed, mobile optimization, core web vitals. If a developer's past work scores poorly on these metrics, you know what their work produces.
How Fast Do Those Sites Load?
Pull up a few of their built sites on your phone, on a real cellular connection, not WiFi. How fast does it feel? Does it snap open or does it drag? Then test the actual numbers with Google PageSpeed Insights or the scanner above.
Site speed is not just a nice-to-have. It is a ranking factor and a conversion factor simultaneously. A developer who delivers slow sites either does not care or does not know how to fix it. Neither is good for you.
Who Owns the Site When the Relationship Ends?
Ask this question directly before you sign anything: if I decide to leave, who owns the domain and the website files?
Some developers retain ownership of the code or host the site on infrastructure that makes it difficult to transfer. Some use proprietary platforms that mean your site effectively cannot move without being rebuilt from scratch. If a developer cannot give you a clear answer that the domain and files belong to you and can be migrated freely, treat that as a red flag.
You should own your own digital infrastructure. Period. If a developer is building your site on a platform or arrangement where you are locked in, that is leverage they hold over you and it will eventually be used, either through price increases, service degradation, or a situation where you want to leave and cannot without starting over.
Ask for References and Actually Call Them
Not just email references. Call the businesses. Ask three questions: Did the developer deliver what was promised on the timeline they said? When problems came up, how did they handle it? Would you hire them again?
References who will not talk on the phone or who give vague non-answers are telling you something. Good developers have past clients who are happy to say so. A developer who cannot produce a single client willing to give a genuine reference either does not have happy clients or does not have the experience they claim.
What Happens When Something Breaks?
Websites break. Hosting goes down, plugins conflict, something stops rendering correctly after an update. Ask the developer what their support process looks like after launch. Is there a retainer? An SLA? A flat support rate? Do they respond within hours or days?
If the answer is vague or nonexistent, you are on your own after the launch check clears. For most local business owners who are not technical, that is a serious problem. You need someone who is reachable and can fix issues quickly, not someone who disappears after delivery.
What Is the Actual Deliverable?
Get specifics in writing. Not "a professional website" but: how many pages, what functionality, what platform, what hosting, who writes the copy, who provides images, what SEO work is included, what does the process look like from start to launch, and what are the exact payment terms and milestones.
Vague proposals produce vague outcomes and disputed invoices. A professional developer can tell you exactly what you are getting. If the proposal is a paragraph and a number, that is not a scope. That is a starting point for a dispute.
Do the work before you hire. It takes a few hours and it will save you months of pain. Your website is a sales system, not a brochure, and the person you hire to build it should understand the difference.