/buyer's guide · nine questions, answered honestly
CodeSketch builds websites for a living, so treat this as biased. The nine questions below still work if you never speak to us, and they work the same whether your developer sits in Cape Town, Austin or Manchester. Most business owners hire a developer once every four or five years, which is not enough repetition to get good at it.
/the nine questions
Ask all nine. The answers cost you nothing and they separate a developer who has thought about your business from one who has a template open in another tab.
The right answer is you. Ask directly: if we part ways, do I get the files, and can I host them anywhere I choose? A yes means you own an asset. A no means you are renting, and the rent never stops. Website builders make this deliberately murky, because a site built inside a closed platform usually cannot leave it.
Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Webflow and Shopify are all legitimate for the right job. So is hand-coded HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no universally correct answer, but there is a wrong reason: "it is what I always use". A developer who can name the trade-offs of their own favourite tool is worth more than one who cannot. Our honest version of that comparison is on hand-coded vs Wix and AI builders.
Google publishes the thresholds and they are not a matter of opinion: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Ask the developer to run PageSpeed Insights on their own website, live, while you watch. Not a client site they picked. Their own.
This is the question people are too polite to ask and the one that costs most when it goes unasked. You want a written answer before money moves. Revisions included? A stage where you can walk? Ours is the Blueprint Promise: if you don't love the design at the blueprint stage, you walk away owing nothing. Whatever answer you get, get it in writing.
An estimate is a starting price. A fixed written quote is a price. Hourly billing is not automatically wrong, but it moves all the risk of a slow project onto you. Ask which one you are being given and what specifically would change it. Every CodeSketch quote is fixed, agreed in writing before work starts, and valid for 30 days.
Responsiveness before you pay is the best available prediction of responsiveness after you pay, and it usually gets worse rather than better. Ask for a number in hours or days, then test it. Send a question on a Tuesday afternoon and see what Wednesday brings. We reply within one working day.
Websites decay. Plugins break, contact forms stop delivering without any visible error, certificates expire, a browser update shifts the layout. Ask who is responsible after launch, how you reach them, and what it costs. "It will be fine" is not a maintenance plan. Here is what a real one covers: website care plans.
Portfolios are curated, so everybody's best work looks good. The revealing request is the inherited project: a site somebody else built badly that they had to take over. That is the situation you are in right now, and how they describe that job tells you how they will describe yours.
A website is a destination. Somebody still has to send people to it. Search, referrals, ads, social, an existing customer list, a physical location: any of these can work. What does not work is nobody having thought about it. If your developer has no view on this, that is fine, as long as you do.
/how to decide
Nine questions is a lot to weigh at once. If you rank a developer on only three of them, rank them on these, because they are the hardest to fake and the most expensive to get wrong.
Everything else is recoverable. A site you cannot take with you is a decision you only get to make once, and you make it at the start without realising it.
Anyone claiming a flawless score is either lucky on one page or not measuring. Our own site scores 93 out of 100 on the CodeSketch Website Grader, and we would rather tell you that than pretend it is 100.
This is the difference between buying a website and buying customers. If neither of you has an answer, you are commissioning a brochure that nobody will read.
/warning signs
None of these are proof of a bad developer on their own. Two or more together, and keep looking.
A number said out loud is not a quote. If it will not be written down, it is not a commitment, and the conversation about what it covers will happen after you have paid.
Ask the leaving question early. If the answer is vague, the answer is no.
Or worse, a claimed perfect score. Both mean the same thing: nobody has measured.
Structure, URLs and page speed are decided while the site is being built. Later means rebuilding, and rebuilding costs more than building it right.
Screenshots prove a design existed. Live links prove it shipped, still works, and belongs to a real business.
"The team" is not a person. Find out who actually answers when the contact form breaks on a Friday.
asked all the time
Ask every candidate the same nine questions: who owns the code, what it is built with and why, what their Core Web Vitals numbers are, what happens if you do not like the design, whether the quote is fixed or an estimate, how fast they reply, who fixes the site in six months, whether you can see a project they inherited, and where the traffic is meant to come from. Then rank them on code ownership, performance honesty and traffic thinking, because those three are the hardest to fake.
Start with ownership and money: do I get the code if we part ways, and is this a fixed written quote or an estimate that can move? Then ask about speed, using Google's published thresholds of 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint, 200 milliseconds for Interaction to Next Paint and 0.1 for Cumulative Layout Shift. Then ask what happens after launch, who is responsible, and what it costs.
A builder wins when you need something live this afternoon, when the budget genuinely will not stretch, or when you want to change the copy yourself every week. A developer wins when the site has to load fast, rank, convert, or belong to you outright. The honest version of that comparison, including the cases where the builder is the right call, is on our hand-coded vs builders page.
That depends entirely on who built it and how. Sites built inside closed platforms usually cannot be exported and run elsewhere. Hand-coded sites can. With CodeSketch the code is yours: hosting still has to be paid for by somebody, as it does everywhere, but there is no lock-in to us specifically. Take the code and self-host it anywhere if you ever want out.
Yes, and it is common. What matters is not the distance but the overlap and the answers to the nine questions above. CodeSketch works remotely worldwide, quotes in your currency, and runs projects over WhatsApp and email. There is more detail for UK, US, EU and Australian clients on the international page.
Whichever developer you choose, choose them with real answers.
A fixed quote costs nothing, is agreed in writing before any work starts, and holds for 30 days, so you can compare it honestly against anything else on your desk. CodeSketch works remotely worldwide and quotes in your currency.