Question 1

How much does a website cost in the UK?

Accepted Answer

A small business website in the UK ranges from about £50 hiring an offshore developer directly to several thousand pounds through a local agency. The spread is mostly labour cost by location and how many people sit between you and the person building it, not quality by definition.

Question 2

How much does an e-commerce website cost?

Accepted Answer

A functioning online store with real checkout starts from about $150 hiring direct and runs to $10,000 or more through an agency. What moves the number most is not product count — it is how far your catalogue sits from a standard product grid.

Question 3

Why do website quotes vary so much?

Accepted Answer

Two reasons stacked together. Location and overhead account for most of the spread, because the same work costs different amounts depending on where the developer lives and how many salaries sit between you and them. The rest is that the quotes are often not for the same site at all.

Question 4

What should a website quote include?

Accepted Answer

A quote should name a fixed price against a written scope, list the deliverables, state who owns the hosting, domain and code, define what counts as a post-launch fix and for how long, and say what is explicitly excluded. Anything vaguer becomes a negotiation in week two.

Question 5

Is it cheaper to hire an offshore developer?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes, because the hourly rate reflects a different cost of living. The risk is not quality — it is contracting: who owns the accounts, what makes the personal-data transfer lawful, how payment is staged, and what you are left holding if they stop replying.

Question 6

Is it legal to hire a web developer outside the UK or EU?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with the right paperwork. If the developer will touch personal data — a contact form, an order database, a CRM export — you are making a restricted international transfer, which needs a lawful mechanism: EU Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

Question 7

What is a DPA and do I need one?

Accepted Answer

A Data Processing Agreement is a contract setting out how a supplier handles personal data on your behalf: what they may do with it, what security they apply, who else can see it, and what happens on a breach. You need one whenever a supplier processes personal data for you.

Question 8

How do I pay a developer in another country?

Accepted Answer

Bank transfer or a service like Wise, against a numbered invoice, split across milestones. For a first engagement with an unknown supplier, a marketplace with escrow is worth the fee — it buys a dispute process that does not otherwise exist across borders.

Question 9

What if my web developer disappears?

Accepted Answer

Recover the domain first, because everything depends on it and a transfer takes days rather than minutes. Then hosting, then take a full backup with whatever access you still have. If the code was never in a repository you control, budget for a rebuild.

Question 10

Who owns my website after it is built?

Accepted Answer

You should own all of it: the domain registered to your business, hosting in your account, code in a repository you control, and the payment provider account in your name. If any of those sit with the supplier, you are renting the site at their discretion.

Question 11

How do I check who owns my domain?

Accepted Answer

Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain and read the registrant field. It should name your business. If it names your developer, an agency, or a privacy-proxy service you did not arrange, you do not control the single asset everything else depends on.

Question 12

How do I write a website brief?

Accepted Answer

Answer four things: what the site must do, who produces the content, what it must integrate with, and when it has to launch. Every scope dispute I have seen traces back to one of those being left implicit, and a clear brief also makes quotes comparable.

Question 13

How long does a website take to build?

Accepted Answer

A small business website takes about three days of build time once scope is agreed and content exists. An e-commerce store takes about a week, a custom application about ten days. What stretches those timelines is almost never the code — it is decisions and missing content.

Question 14

How long does an e-commerce site take to build?

Accepted Answer

About seven days from signed scope for a standard catalogue store, provided your product content exists on day one. Larger catalogues, custom pricing logic or third-party integrations add time — and a supplier should tell you that before you commit rather than in week two.

Question 15

What do you need from me to start a website project?

Accepted Answer

One person who can make decisions within a day, your content or a decision to reuse what exists, photographs of real work, and access to your domain and hosting in your own name. The first item matters more than all the others combined on a short build.

Question 16

What happens after my website launches?

Accepted Answer

Thirty days of snag fixes are included — anything that does not work as scoped is corrected at no charge. You receive written handover documentation and every credential. After that, maintenance is optional and monthly, and nothing you paid for stops working if you decline it.

Question 17

Do I need a website maintenance plan?

Accepted Answer

You need maintenance; whether you buy it is a separate question. Software updates, backups, monitoring and security patching have to happen on any site with a CMS or a database. A static site needs far less, and the honest answer depends on which you have.

Question 18

What is included in an SEO retainer?

Accepted Answer

A monthly technical crawl and fix cycle, Search Console monitoring and issue resolution, content briefs based on your real query data, schema and internal-linking maintenance, and a written report saying what changed, what moved and what is next.

Question 19

Can you guarantee first page Google rankings?

Accepted Answer

No, and nobody credibly can. Search engines do not sell placement in organic results, and anyone offering a guaranteed position is either buying links, targeting a term nobody searches, or both. What can be guaranteed is that the technical barriers get identified and removed.

Question 20

How long until SEO results show?

Accepted Answer

Technical fixes such as indexation and crawl errors can show in Search Console within two to four weeks. Ranking movement realistically takes three to six months, and longer on a new domain. Impressions move before clicks, which is the earliest honest signal.

Question 21

Should I hire a web developer near me?

Accepted Answer

Proximity matters less than most buyers expect. A written scope, a staging URL you can open from your phone, and documented handover solve what meeting in person used to solve. Hire locally when you genuinely need someone in the room, or when procurement rules require a domestic supplier — otherwise judge on evidence, not distance.

Question 22

What is the difference between website design and website development?

Accepted Answer

Design decides what the site looks like and how it is arranged; development is what makes it exist and work in a browser. On small projects one person does both. The distinction matters commercially because a quote covering design only leaves you holding a set of images no visitor can use.

Question 23

What does a professional web developer do that a cheap one does not?

Accepted Answer

The visible work looks similar. The difference is what exists after launch: a written scope, a staging URL, tested backups, accounts in your name, and handover documentation. A cheap build usually omits all five, which is why the second developer costs more than the first would have. Judge on those five, not on rate.

Question 24

Why is my website not showing on Google?

Accepted Answer

Work through four causes in order: the site is blocked from crawling, it renders empty without JavaScript, it is indexed but ranks below where anyone looks, or it is too new. Search Console URL Inspection tells you which within a minute.

Question 25

How do I get my website indexed by Google?

Accepted Answer

Verify the site in Search Console, submit an XML sitemap, make sure nothing blocks crawling, and ensure every page is linked internally from somewhere. Indexing is a quality decision as well as a discovery one — Google fetches far more than it keeps.

Question 26

How do I check if my site is indexed?

Accepted Answer

Search site:yourdomain.com for a rough count, then use Search Console URL Inspection for a definitive answer on any specific page. The site: operator is approximate; URL Inspection tells you exactly what Google has, and why.

Question 27

What is Google Search Console for?

Accepted Answer

Search Console shows how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your site: which queries you appear for, which pages are indexed and why others are not, crawl errors, and Core Web Vitals field data. It is the only source of your own query data and it is free.

Question 28

Do I need an XML sitemap?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it should be generated rather than hand-written. A sitemap helps engines discover URLs they might otherwise miss and signals when pages genuinely changed. It cannot make a thin page rank, and it will not rescue a page nothing links to.

Question 29

What should be in my robots.txt?

Accepted Answer

Allow everything you want crawled, disallow only genuinely wasteful paths such as internal search results, reference your sitemap, and name the AI crawlers explicitly. Remember it controls crawling, not indexing — disallowing a page does not remove it from search.

Question 30

Why is my website slow?

Accepted Answer

Usually one of four things: unoptimised images, render-blocking CSS or JavaScript, a slow server response, or a framework executing before anything paints. Measure first — the cause is almost never what people assume, and fixing the wrong one changes nothing.

Question 31

What are Core Web Vitals?

Accepted Answer

Three metrics Google uses to measure page experience: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. They are assessed on real visitor data over a rolling 28-day window.

Question 32

How do I improve Largest Contentful Paint?

Accepted Answer

Find what is on the critical path before the largest element can paint, and remove it. Usually a render-blocking stylesheet, a late-discovered font, an oversized image, or a client-rendered page where nothing paints until a bundle executes.

Question 33

Does page speed affect Google rankings?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but less than commonly claimed. Core Web Vitals are a real ranking input and behave more like a tie-breaker between otherwise comparable pages. The larger, more reliable effect of speed is on conversion — slow pages lose customers regardless of ranking.

Question 34

Is my site visible to ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

Accepted Answer

Test it rather than assume. Fetch your home page with each AI crawler user-agent and read the status code — every line should be 200. A 403 means an edge proxy is refusing them before your server or robots.txt is ever consulted.

Question 35

Should I block AI crawlers?

Accepted Answer

It depends on how you make money. A publisher whose revenue depends on people arriving to read has a genuine argument for blocking. A business selling services does not — blocking removes you from the answer at the moment a buyer is asking who to hire.

Question 36

How do I get cited by AI search engines?

Accepted Answer

Three prerequisites in strict order: AI crawlers must be able to fetch you, your content must be in the HTML without JavaScript, and independent sources must corroborate that you exist. Fail the first and nothing else counts.

Question 37

Do I need an llms.txt file?

Accepted Answer

No major AI crawler is known to require or obey llms.txt, so it is not a mechanism. It costs almost nothing if generated from data you already maintain, it is genuinely useful to humans evaluating you, and it cannot hurt — publish one and expect nothing.

Question 38

Does my website need schema markup?

Accepted Answer

It is not a ranking factor, and it is worth adding. Structured data removes ambiguity about who you are and what you sell, which is what makes rich results possible and what answer engines increasingly parse in preference to guessing from prose.

Question 39

What is JSON-LD and why is it preferred?

Accepted Answer

JSON-LD is a block of JSON inside a script tag describing what a page is about. Google recommends it over Microdata and RDFa because it sits apart from the visible markup, so a design change cannot silently break it.

Question 40

Do FAQ rich results still work?

Accepted Answer

Not for most sites. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023 and has not reversed it. The markup is still worth shipping, because Q&A pairs are the cleanest extractable format for AI answer engines.

Question 41

What is a canonical tag for?

Accepted Answer

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same content is reachable at several addresses. It consolidates ranking signals onto the URL you nominate, rather than letting the engine choose for you.

Question 42

Is duplicate content a penalty?

Accepted Answer

No, not in ordinary cases. There is no duplicate content penalty. The cost is that ranking signals get split across URLs and the engine picks a canonical version that may not be yours — which is a competition problem rather than a punishment.

Question 43

How do I move my website without losing rankings?

Accepted Answer

Build a complete old-URL to new-URL redirect map from a crawl of every page currently returning 200, deploy it as single-hop 301s before anything else changes, and keep it for at least a year. Everything else in a migration is recoverable; a missing map is not.

Question 44

Should I buy a .com or a country domain?

Accepted Answer

Buy a generic domain — .com, .dev or .co — unless you are certain the business will only ever serve one country. A ccTLD such as .co.uk sends a strong local signal and permanently hard-codes your geo-targeting to that country.

Question 45

Do I need hreflang?

Accepted Answer

Only if you have genuinely equivalent pages for different languages or regions. One English site serving several English-speaking countries needs none — and declaring hreflang="en" and x-default both pointing at the same URL is inert.

Question 46

Should I build a page for every town I serve?

Accepted Answer

Only where you can write three genuinely specific paragraphs about that town — completed jobs, named areas, local requirements, real photographs. Pages differing only by place name are doorway pages, which is a policy violation rather than a grey area.

Question 47

How do I rank in Google Maps?

Accepted Answer

Three levers decide it: a verified business profile with the most specific correct category, name-address-phone details identical everywhere they appear, and a steady flow of genuine reviews. Your website matters far less than people expect.

Question 48

Should I use Shopify or a custom build?

Accepted Answer

Use Shopify if your catalogue is conventional and you want to be trading next week. Choose a custom build when the catalogue does not fit a product grid or the checkout carries business logic. Any other basis for the decision is preference dressed as advice.

Question 49

Is WooCommerce good for SEO?

Accepted Answer

It can be, and it is not automatically. WooCommerce gives you full control of URLs, markup and content, which is an advantage over closed platforms. The risks are plugin bloat slowing the site and faceted navigation generating thousands of crawlable URLs.

Question 50

How do I stop Google indexing my filter pages?

Accepted Answer

Canonicalise filtered views to the clean category URL and stop linking to combinations you do not want crawled. Use robots.txt disallow deliberately and second — it blocks the crawl that would read a noindex, stranding URLs already in the index.

Question 51

What should I do with out of stock products?

Accepted Answer

It depends on whether the product is coming back. Temporarily out of stock: keep the page indexed with availability set to OutOfStock. Discontinued with a replacement: 301 to it. Discontinued with nothing similar: keep the page or return 410. Seasonal: never delete.

Question 52

Why are customers abandoning my checkout?

Accepted Answer

Most commonly because cost appears late — shipping, tax or fees revealed at the final step — or because an account is forced before purchase. Both are build decisions rather than marketing problems, and both are cheap to fix before launch.

Question 53

What happens if a customer closes the tab after paying?

Accepted Answer

On a correctly built store, nothing bad — the payment provider webhook creates the order regardless of the browser. On a store that creates orders on the success-page redirect, that customer has been charged and has no order, and you find out when they complain.

Question 54

Do I need a payment gateway, and which one?

Accepted Answer

You need one to take card payments online. Choose on three practical constraints before comparing features: does it support your country as a merchant, does it accept your business category, and how long until payout.

Question 55

Can I take card payments from Pakistan?

Accepted Answer

Stripe does not support Pakistan as a merchant country. Local gateways and bank-integrated options exist for Pakistani businesses, and a Pakistan-based developer can build and test Stripe against a client’s own account in a supported country.

Question 56

How do I find keywords for my business?

Accepted Answer

Start with Search Console query data if you have any impressions at all — it is the only record of what people actually typed to reach you. Then autocomplete, People Also Ask, and the questions clients ask on calls, which almost nobody mines.

Question 57

How many pages should my website have?

Accepted Answer

As many as you can fill with something genuinely useful, and no more. Six pages of honest, specific content beat thirty of filler in both directions — buyers read them and search engines rank them. Page count is an output, not a target.

Question 58

Do blogs still help SEO?

Accepted Answer

Genuinely useful content still works; publishing posts because a schedule says so does not. For a site with no authority, informational content is the only realistic way to enter a SERP at all — and the only mechanism that earns links without buying them.

Question 59

Is AI-written content bad for SEO?

Accepted Answer

Google’s position is that how content is produced matters less than whether it is useful. What is penalised is scaled content abuse — generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings — and that applies to human-written filler exactly as much as machine-written filler.

Question 60

Is buying backlinks safe?

Accepted Answer

No. Bought links violate search engine guidelines, and the failure mode is losing the site rather than losing the gain. It works until detection, and every recovery I have seen cost more than the shortcut saved.

Question 61

How do I get backlinks?

Accepted Answer

Publish something worth citing, then claim every profile you are entitled to. Nobody links to a services page — they link to original data, a useful tool, or a resource that answered something properly. That is slow and it is the only durable method.

Question 62

How do I get more Google reviews?

Accepted Answer

Ask every satisfied customer immediately after the work, in person or by a message with a direct link. Recency matters more than total — eight reviews from the last six months read better than twenty from four years ago.

Question 63

How do I get more local customers from my website?

Accepted Answer

Fix the profile before the website: verified, correct category, honest service areas, complete fields, real photographs and a steady flow of reviews. Then make the site fast on a phone with a tappable phone number and a form that returns a real answer.

Question 64

How often should I update WordPress?

Accepted Answer

Security releases immediately, everything else monthly with a backup taken first. An unpatched WordPress install is the most common route to a hacked small-business site, and the risk grows with every plugin.

Straight answers to the questions clients actually ask

Pricing

Hiring

Process

SEO

Performance

E-commerce

AI search

Local

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Accessibility

Security and hosting

Why every answer is on its own page

The format, and why it is uniform

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