Web Design Red Flags: 9 Warning Signs Before You Sign

Most lists of web design red flags are about design. Bad fonts, stock photos, a carousel nobody asked for.

Those are not what costs you money.

What costs a local business owner money is written into the deal before a single page gets designed. Who owns the domain. What a change costs. Who fixes the site the week you change your hours.

Here are nine, roughly in the order you will meet them.

1. The quote does not name the pages

"A five-page website" is not a quote. It is a number with a word next to it.

Ask which five. A homepage, a contact page, and three what?

A real quote names every page: home, contact, a page for each service you sell, a page for each neighborhood you serve. You should be able to read the list and picture the site.

Vague scope is how a build creeps upward after you have already paid a deposit. If they cannot name the pages, they have not thought about your business yet, and you are the one who will pay for the thinking. It is also worth knowing what a local business website actually costs before you hear a single number.

2. Changes are billed by the hour after launch

This is the one that gets almost everybody.

The build price is the number you negotiate. The change price is the number you live with. You will want changes. You raise a price, you drop a service, you hire someone, you close for a week in August.

Ask flat out: what does a change cost after launch, and how long does it take? "We bill hourly" means every small correction has a meeting attached to it, so most owners stop asking.

That is how a site ends up with 2024 prices on it. Not neglect. A billing structure that punishes you for keeping your own site honest.

3. The domain is registered in their name

Your domain is the address customers and Google know you by. It should be registered in your business name, with your email as the contact, and you should be able to log in to the registrar yourself.

A designer managing it for you is fine and common. A designer holding it in their own account with no way for you to reach it is not.

You find out at the worst moment: the relationship ends, or they stop answering email, and your address is inside an account you cannot open. Some owners end up buying a new domain and starting their search visibility over.

Before you sign, ask whose name the domain will be in and ask to see the registrar account. The full picture of what you own and what you rent is worth ten minutes of reading.

4. Nobody will tell you who holds the logins

Same problem, different door. Hosting, the domain, the analytics, the site's own admin.

Ask for a list of every account the site depends on and who the owner of record is on each. A straight answer takes a minute to give.

A vague answer is not secrecy for its own sake. Lock-in is a retention strategy, and some shops rely on it.

5. They promise you a Google ranking

Nobody controls Google's results, and nobody controls whether chat bots like ChatGPT mention you. Anyone selling a position is selling something they cannot deliver.

The honest version of the pitch is narrower and duller. A site can be readable, complete, and consistent with your Google listing. That is what is in your control, and it is genuinely worth paying for.

"Guaranteed page one" belongs on the same shelf as the other local SEO myths that cost owners money. When you hear it, the rest of the meeting is sales.

6. The portfolio has no live links

Screenshots are cheap. Ask for three live sites they built and open all three on your phone.

Check the obvious things. Does the phone number dial when you tap it? Are the hours there? Is there a page for each service, or one long homepage?

Then check the unglamorous thing: is any of it current? A portfolio full of sites frozen on launch day tells you exactly what year your site will be stuck in.

7. They never ask about your Google listing

For a local business, the Google listing is the source of truth. It is where your hours, phone number, services and reviews already live, and where customers find you first.

A designer who never mentions it is going to retype your hours into a page and leave them there. Then you change your hours on Google, the site keeps the old ones, and customers arrive at a locked door.

Ask how the site stays matched to your Google listing when something changes. If the answer is "email us", price that in. That is a phone call every time your life changes.

8. Quality is described in adjectives, never checks

Modern. Clean. Professional. Optimized.

None of those can be checked, and words that cannot be checked cannot be argued with later.

Ask what gets measured. Does the page load fast on a phone on a weak signal? Is every service on its own page? Are the hours and prices on the page as text, not baked into an image? Does the site say the same thing your listing says?

That is a report card for a real barbershop site, grading the old site and the rebuild on the same checks: 75 before, 100 after. The number matters less than the fact that there is one. Checks you can read are the difference between a site you can hold someone to and a site you can only have opinions about.

9. Full payment is due before you see anything

Design work reasonably takes a deposit. All of it, up front, before you have seen a page, is a different arrangement.

An agency build for a local business commonly runs $2,000 to $10,000 before hosting. That is a lot of money to hand over for a description.

Ask what you see, and when. Ask what happens if you look at the first draft and it is wrong. If the answer is "that is what the revisions are for" and revisions are billed hourly, read flag two again.

The four lines to get in writing

Everything above collapses into four things. Get them in writing, in any deal, with anyone.

• The page list. Every page by name, including one per service and one per area.
• The change price. What a change costs after launch and how long it takes.
• The domain. Registered in your business name, your email as contact, and you can log in.
• The exit. What happens to the site, the domain and your content if you stop paying.

If a shop answers all four plainly, most of the risk is gone, whatever their portfolio looks like. If they dodge one, that is the one that will cost you.

If you are already stuck

Plenty of owners are reading this a year too late. The site is old, the designer is gone, and nobody knows the passwords.

Start with the domain. Look up your domain's public registration record and see whose name and email are on it. If it is yours, you are in better shape than you think. If it is not, ask for the transfer in writing before you do anything else. A domain costs $10 to $20 a year to hold; leverage over your address is worth far more than that to whoever has it.

Then decide honestly whether the site is worth rescuing. A site you cannot edit, on an account you cannot reach, is not an asset. It is a hostage situation with hosting fees.

And you are allowed to want something simpler than what you were sold.

Type your business name at 30secondsites.com and see the site built from your Google listing. Looking is free. No card, no login, no email until you want to keep it.