Before Indigo, I saw business owners get charged for work that never happened. I saw sites go down with no developer answering the phone. I saw contracts that locked people into designs they did not even own.
If you are hiring a website developer or a web design agency to build your site, ask these questions first. Get answers before you sign anything.
1. Where does my hosting live, and who pays for it?
A lot of developers put their sites on cheap shared servers. These servers hold dozens or hundreds of other broken websites. Six months later, your site loads slowly. The developer blames your traffic. You blame yourself. The real problem is the server.
What I tell my clients at Indigo: We test every site thoroughly before launch to make sure speed and performance are where they need to be. If we host it, we guarantee it. If you want to use your own hosting, we help you set it up. No secrets.
SEO note: Google ranks faster sites higher. If a developer says hosting is included but will not tell you the server type, that is a problem.
2. Do I own my design and my code?
This sounds obvious. But many business owners are surprised to learn they only rent their website.
I had a roofing contractor come to Indigo last year. He wanted to leave his previous developer. The contract stated that the developer kept all intellectual property. The contractor had to start completely over. He lost thousands of dollars.
My advice: Get this in writing. If you pay for the work, you own the work. Do not sign any contract that includes a license fee for a standard business website.
3. How do you handle technical performance and structured data?
Most business owners ask if the site looks good. That is the wrong question.
You need to ask what is happening under the hood. That means image compression, page speed, mobile responsiveness, and schema markup. Schema markup is code that tells Google you are a local business with a physical address and service area, not just a random web page.
A simple test: Load the site on an older phone using cellular data. If the developer did not optimize the images, the site will be slow and difficult to use.
Local SEO note: If your site does not properly mark up your hours of operation and service area, you will not appear in local searches. I spend a lot of time fixing this for clients who were told their last site was SEO ready. It was not.
4. Can you show me a project that did not go well?
Every agency shows you their best work. The big brands. The beautiful designs. The glowing case studies.
Ask to see the other side. Ask them to describe a website that underperformed or a project that had serious problems.
Why this matters: If they cannot answer this honestly, they are either lying or inexperienced. Every developer has had a project that went off track. A good developer will tell you what went wrong and what they learned from it. That honesty tells you they solve real problems instead of hiding them.
5. Are you optimizing for AI search engines?
This question matters more in 2026 than it did two years ago.
Your customers are not only using Google. They are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI tools to find businesses. These AI engines read your website differently than a traditional search engine does.
What a good developer should do: Structure your data so AI tools can scrape and understand it correctly. This is called LLM optimization. If your web developer says that is not a real thing or not important, they are not keeping up with the industry.
6. What is your response time for issues?
Things go wrong. A plugin conflicts. A form stops sending emails. A security update breaks a feature.
Ask your developer how they handle these situations. Do they have a ticketing system? Do you get a direct phone number? How quickly do they typically respond?
At Indigo, we get to issues as soon as possible. We do not let things sit for days. When your site has a problem, you are losing opportunities every minute it is not working correctly. A developer who takes two days to answer an email is not someone you want relying on.
The bottom line
If you are looking for a developer, ask these six questions. If they hesitate or give vague answers, keep looking.
If you want a straightforward evaluation of your current site, call us. No hard sell. Just an honest conversation about what is working, what is broken, and how we would fix it.
Call Indigo at (631) 630-9845 or contact our team here. We offer a free evaluation. Talk to a real person.
