Most business owners make the same mistake when hiring a web developer.
They ask: “how much does it cost?” — and choose the cheapest option.
Six months later they have a WordPress site that loads in nine seconds, a contact form that goes nowhere, zero Google rankings, and a developer who stopped replying after the final payment cleared.
Here’s what to look for instead.
1. Ask for live URLs — not screenshots
Every developer has a portfolio. Screenshots, mockup images, Behance pages.
Screenshots prove nothing. They can be someone else’s work, a fake project, or a site that looked good in design but performs terribly in production.
Ask for live URLs. Three minimum. Then:
- Open each one on your phone — not your laptop
- Time how long it takes to load
- Try the contact form or booking button
- Check if it looks like a template or genuinely custom
- Search
site:thatwebsite.comin Google to see if it’s indexed
If a developer can’t give you three live URLs of real client sites — move on.
2. Test the mobile performance yourself
Go to pagespeed.web.dev. Paste the URL of any site the developer built. Run the mobile test.
A score of 90 or above on mobile: fast, stable, built with performance in mind.
A score below 70 — where most WordPress + Elementor builds land — means the site is actively harming its Google rankings and losing visitors on slow connections.
If the developer’s own portfolio site scores below 80 on mobile, you have all the information you need.
3. Understand what you’re actually buying
“Website” covers an enormous range of actual deliverables. Be specific.
Ask:
Is this a custom design or a template? Custom means designed specifically for your business. Template means a bought or free theme with your name and photos dropped in. Templates look like templates — which signals to every visitor that you didn’t invest in your business’s digital presence.
Who writes the code? A developer who builds custom sites writes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by hand (or uses modern frameworks like Astro or Next.js). A developer who “builds websites” might be installing WordPress and dragging blocks around. Both produce a website. The performance, security, and longevity are completely different.
Where is it hosted? You should know — and ideally control — where your site lives. If the answer is “on our servers,” ask what happens when you want to move. Your site and your data should be portable.
What happens after delivery? 30 days of free bug fixes is standard. After that — what’s the process for changes? Who do you call if the site goes down?
4. Check if they understand leads — not just design
A website that looks beautiful and generates zero enquiries is a decoration, not a business tool.
Ask any developer: “How will this website generate leads for my business?”
Listen for specifics. WhatsApp integration. Contact form routing. Call-to-action placement. Local SEO setup — Google Business Profile, schema markup, sitemap. Mobile-first design because your customers are on phones.
If the answer is focused entirely on how it will look — colours, fonts, animations — and says nothing about how it will perform, you’re about to pay for a brochure.
For most Indian B2C businesses — taxi services, tour operators, clinics, coaches, contractors — enquiries start on WhatsApp. A website without a direct, frictionless WhatsApp CTA is leaving leads on the table from day one.
5. The pricing red flags
Too cheap. If a complete business website costs less than a couple of days of anyone’s time, it’s a template install. There is no version of custom design, custom code, WhatsApp integration and SEO setup that fits in that number. It’s either a free theme, outsourced at a markup, or the developer plans to disappear after payment.
Too expensive without justification. A 5-page business website is not an enterprise engagement. If the quote is high, ask exactly what’s included — pages, functionality, design process, timeline. Sometimes it’s justified. Often it’s just agency overhead you’re paying for.
No ballpark given without seeing “requirements” first. For a standard business website, any experienced developer should give you a range in the first conversation. Refusing to do so usually means pricing will be adjusted based on what they think you’ll pay.
What actually moves a quote, in rough order of weight:
- Page count and templates. Five pages off one design system is a different job from fifteen bespoke layouts.
- Whether you need to edit it yourself. A CMS or admin panel is real software, and it roughly doubles the surface being built.
- Payments, bookings or logins. The moment money or accounts are involved, so is testing you can’t skip.
- Who writes the copy. Ask early. Half the projects that stall are waiting on words, not code.
Any experienced developer can walk you through these on a first call and give you one fixed number afterwards. That conversation — not a published rate card — is what an honest quote comes from.
6. The payment and refund structure tells you a lot
A professional developer works on a clear split: advance to start, balance on delivery. Standard is 50/50.
More importantly — what happens if you don’t like the work?
A developer confident in their work offers a refund window. I offer a Day-5 design preview: if you don’t like what you see, full refund of the advance, no questions. That’s a professional putting their confidence in writing.
100% upfront with no refund policy tells you something about how they think about accountability.
Ask for a GST invoice. A developer issuing proper invoices is operating as a real business. One who only accepts cash with no documentation is not.
7. Ongoing relationship, not one-time transaction
A website is infrastructure you’ll need to update, fix, and improve over time.
The developer you hire is also the person you’ll call when something breaks before a peak season, when you need a new page for a new service, or when Google updates something and you need someone to diagnose it.
Ask: “Are you available after delivery? What’s your typical response time?”
A developer who replies on WhatsApp within an hour during business hours — and says so explicitly — is someone you can rely on. A “send an email and we’ll get back to you” system is not a working relationship.
The short checklist
Before you pay anyone to build your website:
- ✓ Seen 3+ live URLs of their actual work
- ✓ Tested mobile Lighthouse score on at least one — 80+
- ✓ Confirmed: custom design or template?
- ✓ Asked how the site will generate leads, not just how it looks
- ✓ Understood hosting, ownership, and portability
- ✓ Confirmed refund policy and payment structure
- ✓ Tested their response time — WhatsApp them and see how fast they reply
- ✓ GST invoice available
If you can check all eight, you’re hiring with your eyes open.
I’m Divyansh, solo developer out of Kangra Valley. Custom-coded websites for Indian small businesses. Most clients come from referrals, never a paid ad.
For a sense of what a finished engagement looks like from the other side, the case studies list the stack, the timeline and the outcome for each build. Locally I work as a web developer in Kangra. If you’re a small business in India comparing quotes right now, WhatsApp me your scope — I’ll tell you within a day what a fair number looks like and what red flags to watch for in the others.