Hiring
How to hire a web developer: measure the work, not the pitch
Judge a developer by their delivered work rather than their portfolio. Ask for three live client URLs, run each through PageSpeed Insights on mobile, check whether the content appears in view-source, and ask who owns the code afterwards. Those four checks take an hour and are difficult to fake.
Why is a portfolio nearly useless?
A portfolio is a set of screenshots chosen by the person being assessed. It proves a design existed at some point. It says nothing about whether the site loads in under three seconds, works on a keyboard, contains its own content in the HTML, or still exists.
The substitute is trivially available: ask for the URLs. A developer proud of their work hands them over immediately. Reluctance is itself an answer.
What are the four tests worth running?
- PageSpeed Insights, mobile tab, on three live client sites. Read the field data at the top before the lab score — that is what real visitors experienced.
- View-source on each, searching for a sentence visible on the page. If it is not in the source, the content is client-rendered and non-rendering crawlers see nothing.
- Tab through one site with the mouse unplugged. If you cannot reach the navigation or see where focus is, accessibility was not considered.
- Ask the ownership questions — domain, code, hosting, and what leaving involves.
Three slow sites is a pattern rather than bad luck. One is a client who insisted on a video background; three means this is what gets delivered, and it will be what you get too.
What questions actually separate candidates?
- "What is not included in this quote?"
- A considered list means the work has been scoped. Vague reassurance is the setup for a change-request conversation in week three.
- "What does month thirteen cost?"
- Hosting, support, updates, domain. The total should be stated, not discovered.
- "How do you test accessibility?"
- Most cannot answer. The ones who mention a keyboard or a screen reader are in a small minority.
- "What happens if I want to move to another developer?"
- The single most informative question in the conversation.
- "Tell me about a project that went badly."
- Everyone has one. An honest account of what was learned beats a claim that none exist.
Freelancer, agency or offshore?
Each is right in different circumstances, and anyone telling you one is always better is selling that one.
| Route | Works well when | Fails when |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | Scope is clear, you want direct contact with the person building it | You need multiple specialisms at once, or continuity through illness and holidays |
| Agency | The project spans design, copy, build and campaigns | The budget is small — you fund overhead before anyone writes code |
| Offshore | Budget is the binding constraint and you can specify clearly | Nobody has addressed data transfer, account ownership or payment staging in writing |
| In-house | The site changes weekly and is core to the business | The site changes twice a year — the role has nothing to do between projects |
How do I write a brief that gets comparable quotes?
State the business outcome first — more enquiries, online sales, fewer support calls. Then the audience, the functionality, the content inventory, the integrations by product name, and how you will judge success three months after launch.
Give a budget range. Withholding it does not produce a better price; it produces quotes for four different projects that cannot be compared. A range lets each supplier propose the best version of the work at that level, which is what you are actually trying to evaluate.
What are the warning signs?
- A quote with no exclusions listed anywhere
- Resistance to registering the domain in your name
- Guaranteed first-page rankings — nobody can promise that and offering it signals worse
- Full payment demanded before work begins
- No written scope, only an email thread
- A portfolio of screenshots with no live URLs
- No answer to what happens after launch
Questions people ask about this
- Should I hire the cheapest quote?
- Only after normalising the scope. Add the missing items — content, hosting, support, revisions — to each quote at market rates and compare the totals. Very often the cheapest quote becomes the most expensive, and occasionally it stays cheapest, which is useful to know rather than assume.
- How long should a small business website take?
- A brochure site with content ready is days rather than weeks. An e-commerce build with payments and fulfilment logic is a week or two of build time. The variable that actually stretches projects is content — copy nobody has written and photography nobody has taken. Ask who owns those and by when.
- Is it safe to hire a developer in another country?
- It is common and works well when the contracting is handled. The risk is not code quality; it is whose name the accounts are in, whether the personal-data transfer has a lawful mechanism, how payment is staged, and what happens if they stop replying. Those are answerable before scope, and a supplier who has thought about them answers immediately.
- What if I do not know enough to judge the technical answers?
- You do not need to. The four tests are all measurable by a non-technical person: a score from a free tool, a search in view-source, tabbing with a keyboard, and a direct question about ownership. None of them requires you to evaluate code.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.