The difficulty is not finding developers. It is that from the outside, on the day you are choosing, the excellent one and the one who will stop answering in March look almost identical. Both have a decent portfolio, both are friendly on the call, and both send a quote with a number on it.
The signals that actually predict reliability are all visible before you commit, and none of them are in the portfolio. They are in how someone answers a hard question, what they are willing to put in writing, and how a small paid piece of work goes. This guide is the checklist we would give a friend, including the parts that are inconvenient for us to say.
First, work out what you are actually hiring
Most bad matches are not bad people, they are the wrong shape of supplier for the job. Four options, and they fail in different ways.
| Option | Suits | The characteristic failure |
|---|---|---|
| A builder platform, no developer | A few pages, no unusual requirements, someone in-house who will maintain it. | You outgrow it and discover the thing you need is the one thing it cannot do. Cheap to start, awkward to leave. |
| A solo freelancer | Small, well-defined projects with a clear finish. Often the best value in the market by a distance. | One person is a single point of failure. Illness, a full-time job offer or simply moving on and your site has nobody. The talent is real; the continuity is not. |
| A small studio, two to ten people | Ongoing work, or anything you will still be running in three years. More than one person knows your site. | Costs more than a freelancer, and if you pick a bad one you get freelancer risk at studio prices. Check that more than one person genuinely knows your project. |
| A larger agency | Complex projects, multiple stakeholders, procurement requirements, a need for formal process. | You may be the smallest client, handled by the most junior people, with the senior person you met appearing only at the pitch and the invoice. |
If you are still deciding between doing it yourself and hiring at all, website builder or hire a developer works through that first question properly.
Where to find a reliable web developer
- Ask people in your industry who has built theirs. By a wide margin the best source. You get an unfiltered account of what it was actually like, including the parts nobody puts in a case study.
- Look at sites you like and find out who made them. Often credited in the footer. A working example you can click through beats any list of skills.
- Local, if being able to meet matters to you. It should not be your first filter, but it genuinely helps some people and there is no shame in wanting it.
- Freelance marketplaces, with your eyes open. Real talent is there and so is a great deal of noise. The ratings are gamed often enough that they are weak evidence on their own; the work samples and how someone writes to you are stronger.
- Be sceptical of whoever is advertising hardest. Marketing spend tells you about marketing spend. It is neither a good sign nor a bad one, so weigh it at zero.
- Be careful with unsolicited approaches, particularly cold emails claiming problems with your current site. Some are legitimate. Most are volume outreach, and a few are outright chancers.
The questions that separate people
Anyone can answer what technology they use. These are the ones where the answers actually differ, and where hesitation tells you as much as the words.
- Who owns the finished site, the code, the domain and the hosting account? The only acceptable answer is you, on all four, in writing. If it is anything else, or if the question produces vagueness, stop there. Our guide on who owns your website explains why this is the question that ruins people.
- What happens if you disappear or are unavailable for a month? You want a real answer: who else can get in, where the code lives, how you would get access. Being told it will not happen is not an answer.
- Can I speak to a client from about two years ago, not last month? Recent clients are happy by default. The interesting question is what someone is like in year two, when the invoice is smaller and the request is inconvenient.
- What is not included? A good supplier answers this quickly and specifically, because they have thought about it. Vagueness here becomes an argument later, always about money.
- How do I make a small change myself? If the answer is that every text change goes through them at an hourly rate, you have bought a dependency rather than a website. Sometimes that is right. Know that you are choosing it.
- What does it cost to keep running, per year? Hosting, domain, updates, plugins, licences, support. If someone has not thought about year two, they are quoting you a project rather than a relationship.
- What would you talk me out of? Our favourite question. Anyone who has done this for a while has an immediate answer. Anyone who says everything you have described sounds great is selling.
Red flags worth walking away from
- A quote that arrives without questions. If nobody asked what the site is for or who it is for, they are pricing a template and hoping.
- A price far below everything else. Occasionally it is someone building a portfolio, which can be a genuine bargain. More often it is someone who has not understood the job, and the gap reappears as change requests or as an unfinished project.
- Pressure to decide this week. Discounts that expire are a sales technique, not a business constraint. A supplier worth having will still be worth having in a fortnight.
- Guarantees about search rankings. Nobody controls those. A promise to rank you first is either a misunderstanding of how it works or a straightforward untruth, and either is disqualifying.
- Reluctance to put things in writing. Every serious supplier is used to this and finds it normal. Discomfort with it is the single most reliable warning sign on this list.
- No written contract at all, for any amount you would be annoyed to lose.
- Ownership held hostage, whether by keeping the domain in their account, refusing code access, or hosting you on a platform only they can reach.
What to get in writing before you pay a deposit
- What is being built, in enough detail that both of you would answer the same way in three months.
- What it costs, and what triggers more. Including the hourly or daily rate for anything outside the scope.
- When, with the dates they need things from you marked as clearly as the dates they owe you.
- That you own all of it on final payment: code, content, designs, domain, hosting, accounts. Say the word own.
- How many rounds of changes are included, because this is where projects sour more often than any other clause.
- What happens if either of you wants to stop. Not pessimism, just the thing you will be grateful for in the one case out of ten where it matters.
- Who supports it afterwards, at what cost, and how quickly. Which is the part almost everybody leaves out.
That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is where most of the pain in this market actually lives. The build is a few weeks. Being able to reach someone is years, and it is the thing nobody asks about until a Sunday when the site is down. That gap is exactly what our support and care plans are for, and it is also the most common reason people end up needing our recovering a site from a vanished developer guide instead.
On price
Cheap and expensive are both meaningless without knowing what is inside the number, and the honest guidance is narrower than people expect: discard the outlier at the bottom, do not assume the outlier at the top is better, and choose between the middle two on the strength of their questions rather than their price. How much does a website cost sets out illustrative ranges by type of site if you want a sense of the market before you start.
One caution about the very cheapest quote. The failure mode is rarely that you get a worse website. It is that you get most of a website, then a stall, then silence, and you pay again from the start with someone else. Twice cheap is expensive.
Not for you if
If you take one thing from this: the reliable ones are not identified by their portfolio, their price or their patter. They are identified by being comfortable answering awkward questions in writing. Ask the awkward questions early, and most of this decision makes itself.