How to Choose a Web Developer for Your Business

Choosing a web developer is one of those decisions that looks simple from the outside and gets surprisingly complicated the moment you start asking serious questions. Most founders end up choosing on price or on a beautiful portfolio screenshot, and most regret it within a year. The work that goes into a durable website — one that loads fast, ranks in search, and doesn't break the moment your traffic doubles — is mostly invisible. This post is a checklist for spotting that work before you sign anything.

Start with how they think about your business, not their tech stack

A good developer asks more about your customers than about your color preferences. Before any conversation about React, WordPress, or "headless CMS" comes up, they should be asking:

• Who are you trying to reach?
• What action do you want visitors to take?
• Where does the rest of your business live — Stripe, HubSpot, a custom CRM?
• What does success look like in six months?

If the first call is a feature pitch instead of a discovery call, you're shopping at the wrong place.

Ask to see the boring screens, not the hero shots

Every portfolio shows the home page. Ask to see:

• The contact form on a slow connection.
• The mobile checkout flow.
• The 404 page.
• The admin panel a real client uses every day.

These are the surfaces where corner-cutting shows up. A developer who designs a great admin panel for their own clients takes operational quality seriously.

Get specific about ownership

Make sure you'll own everything when the engagement ends:

• The domain (registered in your account).
• The codebase (a private GitHub or GitLab repo you have admin access to).
• The hosting account (Vercel, Netlify, or your own server).
• The database (with backup access).
• The analytics property and any third-party API keys.

This isn't paranoia — it's the difference between a partnership and a hostage situation.

Performance is not optional anymore

Google's Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP, CLS — are now ranking factors. A site that fails them loses search visibility no matter how much SEO content you publish. Ask your developer:

1. What's their target Lighthouse mobile score? (90+ is normal.)
2. How do they handle image optimization?
3. Do they ship JavaScript only when it's needed?

The right answers don't have to be jargon-heavy, but they should be specific.

Look for a process, not a person

The single biggest predictor of a successful web project is whether the developer has a repeatable process for:

• Discovery and scoping.
• Design and prototyping.
• Code review.
• Deployments and rollback.
• Post-launch support.

A solo developer with a process beats a big agency with chaos every time.

Final test: ask them what they'd push back on

A developer who agrees with everything you say is selling, not building. The good ones will gently push back on bad ideas — too many features in v1, the wrong CMS, a vanity redesign that won't move the needle. That pushback is the most valuable thing you'll get from the relationship.

If you're starting that conversation now, we'd love to hear about your project.