How to Hire the Best Web Designer - Complete Guide

If you are looking for how to hire a web designer to launch your business online or improve your digital presence, you need to know the key factors that will make your investment worthwhile. Not all designers offer the same services or the same quality. Here we explain what you should demand when hiring web design and how to avoid costly mistakes.

Further below you will also find a comparison tool to hire the best web design.

How to hire a web designer and choose the best option

Web design is a strategic investment for your business. It is not just about aesthetics — it is about getting a website that attracts customers, generates conversions and ranks on Google. Below we outline the essential factors for hiring a web designer with confidence.

• Review the warranty offered by the web designer
• Compare prices without sacrificing quality
• Verify the technology used in web and server development
• Make sure maintenance, support and SEO optimisation are included
• Confirm whether the design is unique or a predefined template
• Ask whether development uses code or a page builder (this affects performance)
• Require analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console
• Check that images are optimised for fast loading
• Clarify who writes the content and supplies the images

With a web design office in Coruña, we are a strong option to consider if you are looking for quality.

Advantages of hiring a web designer online

• Compare different web designers and choose the best option
• Receive personalised quotes quickly
• Review testimonials and success stories before hiring
• View examples of the designer's previous work
• Access qualified professionals regardless of location

What to do before hiring a web designer

To ensure your website's success, define your project clearly before hiring a web designer. This will avoid problems and guarantee you get exactly what you need.

• Set clear objectives: Do you need to sell more? Improve your image? Rank on Google?
• Define aesthetics and functionality: If you already have a brand identity, use it. If not, look for designers who offer it.
• Identify your target audience: The website must be designed to attract your ideal customers.
• Set a budget: Be clear about how much you can invest in professional web design.
• Determine the content: Which pages the site will include and what functionality it needs.
• Set a delivery date: A clear deadline speeds up project development.

How to tell if a web designer is worth hiring and delivers quality

Before hiring a web designer, check these aspects:

1. Warranty: At least 3 months. At WebHeroe we offer 2 years.
2. Revisions: They should offer you more than one design version to choose from.
3. Customisation: No templates. The design must be created based on research and with a unique structure.
4. SEO: Web design must include basic search engine optimisation.
5. Load optimisation: The site must be fast and efficient.
6. Responsive design: Adapted for mobile phones and tablets.
7. Support and maintenance: Essential to avoid future problems.

Comparison tool to hire the best web design

If you are in the process of hiring a web designer, use this tool to compare different options and make sure you get the best service.

Simply tick what is on offer, enter the agency name and the agency price. Then click convert and a new document will open with all the information for each agency or web designer you are considering.

What are the most important services when hiring web design

Below are the most important points to consider when choosing the best web design company.

Warranty

I start with this point because I consider it essential in every web design project. We must ask what the warranty covers and for how long. Typically a warranty should cover at least 3 months for any errors arising from the website's development.

For example, at WebHeroe we offer up to 2 years of warranty on any web design project.

Pricing

It is clear that every buyer wants the best quality at the best price. But when we lack technical knowledge we tend to focus heavily on price at the expense of quality. At WebHeroe we have written an article covering several points to consider when comparing WordPress website prices.

Technology

When hiring a website we need to know what technology will be used to build it. In addition to being one of the main factors influencing price, it will also affect other things. At WebHeroe we always recommend using WordPress due to its large number of advantages.

Server and domain included

In simple terms, the server is the hard drive where your website is hosted — a physical object that stores your site's data.

The domain is the name. For this website, for example, it would be webheroe.com.

Some web design companies include both the domain and the server. However, we must ensure the server is of sufficient quality, since among other things it can affect load speed — a factor that directly influences Google rankings and user experience.

Optimisation

The majority of web design companies do not pay much attention to this detail. Yet it is something that directly impacts the success of our project. Optimisation includes, among other things:

• Page load speed
• Page structure
• Website architecture
• Image and video size, format and compression
• Avoiding excessive CSS and JavaScript file loading via code
• Database calls
• Excessive page (DOM) size
• Code optimisation

Keep this very much in mind when hiring a web designer, as it will make the difference between quality work and an average job.

Brand identity

If you do not have a developed brand identity, many web design agencies can help you with this. Although it is often underestimated, your project's logo is its main ambassador.

Unique design

A large number of web design agencies tend to use templates, which can significantly reduce the price. But using a unique design offers a large number of advantages:

1. Full adaptation to your project's needs
2. Full adaptation to your brand image
3. A guarantee of truly responsive design — because templates never adapt 100% to all designs
4. Reputation in the eyes of your target audience

It is true that a website's price can increase considerably with a very creative and original design. The key is knowing whether your project actually needs that.

Code-based vs page builder development

If you have no web development background, you may not know that there are 2 ways to build a site using CMSs like WordPress: via page builders or via code. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

To summarise, using page builders negatively affects:

• Code quality
• Load time
• Potential incompatibilities
• Designs not fully adapted to all devices
• More limited customisation
• Higher maintenance costs

While code-based WordPress development carries a higher cost, in terms of optimisation it reaches levels that the other method simply cannot match. It is important to understand that code-based development in WordPress means generating CSS code and certain PHP and JavaScript functionalities from scratch while maintaining the WordPress framework. In other words, ease of use and compatibility with other plugins remain 100% intact.

Support

Having a direct and ongoing line of communication with the company we hire to resolve our questions and advise us on the different technical options is essential.

Maintenance

If you do not have advanced web development knowledge, it is strongly recommended to outsource this service to an external company. Most companies offer this service, though not all include it in the initial web design package.

Basic SEO

SEO is clearly a long-term, ongoing effort. But from the start, during the design and development phase, it is very important to consider a set of basic SEO factors so your site is positioned for search engine visibility from day one. We are talking about On-Page SEO, and some of its most important elements are:

1. Website architecture
2. Category and URL structure
3. Internal linking
4. Content
5. Links to external pages
6. HTML tag structure and order
7. HTML attributes such as alt and title
8. Metatags such as hreflang, description, lang, title, etc.
9. Schema
10. SSL certificate
11. Sitemap
12. Robots.txt

Analytics tools

When we hire a web designer, we sometimes think the job ends when the site is delivered. That is far from the truth — once development is complete, the analysis work begins. For this we need to install a set of tools that provide valuable data about our audience and how they interact with our site. The minimum free tools we recommend installing are:

• Google Analytics – It would also be very helpful to define a series of events via Gtag or GTM
• Google Search Console – Including sitemap configuration and user setup
• Microsoft Clarity – To obtain individual interaction data as well as heatmaps, among other features

It is important to ask the agency you hire whether installation of these tools is included, because without them you will have no data to analyse in order to improve your site and get the most out of it. And not only that — without some of these tools it will also be harder for Google to rank you.

Image resizing and compression

Images are typically the heaviest elements on a webpage. This is why a quality web design service must include a strategy for resizing, compression and choosing the right format.

Content writing

Content is king. And rightly so — the text on your website is the most relevant element for ranking on Google. Why? Because what is talked about and how it is communicated is what Google uses to determine who your audience is, and therefore which searches you appear in.

Writing website content may seem straightforward, but accounting for factors such as topical relevance, writing quality, addressing your target audience, being subtly persuasive and SEO-friendly is a job for professionals. That is why many agencies include content writing when they build a site.

Personalised tutorials

It is perfectly normal for website owners to have no development or design knowledge. That is why many companies include personalised tutorials tailored to each project, explaining how to manage the site, make changes and create new articles (posts) and pages.

This service is of great value for entrepreneurs with limited resources, as they themselves will be able to handle most of their website without needing to hire a developer on a permanent basis (or almost).

How do we know if a design agency will deliver quality development?

This is quite difficult to know without advanced technical knowledge. But one very simple approach is to check what score the agency's own website gets in Google PageSpeed Insights. This is a free Google tool that is very easy to use and returns a score from 0 to 100. Google uses a set of important web development criteria to calculate this score, including:

• Layout shifts in the website structure
• Attributes correctly applied to elements
• Image sizes
• Image formats
• Use of external resources
• Use of unnecessary resources
• Speed index
• Time to load the first element
• Time to interactive
• Blocking time
• Time to load the last element

If scores are below 80, we can be fairly certain that their commitment to quality development is not very strong. The following link shows an example:
PageSpeed Insights scores for this WebHeroe page

It is always advisable to analyse the same page multiple times, as servers can experience temporary instability. Of course, such instability should not be frequent or cause scores to vary dramatically.

Who we are and where we are going

To have a clear direction for our project, we need to know exactly who we are, who our target audience is, what resources we have, who our competitors are, and what product or service we offer. Conducting thorough research on all this may seem overwhelming, but I can assure you that this knowledge will make a real difference when it comes to defining your strategy.

Furthermore, a well-defined project will attract more competitive quotes. This is because the web designer you want to hire will not need to add any margin for "grey areas" or "unclear sections".

Knowing what we need, not just what we want

This is something very easy to explain and even easier to understand, but very few people are objective enough to actually put it into practice. Seeing everything from our own point of view can blind us to the point where we lose sight of what our target users actually want.

It is very important to build a structure and design for our website that makes our users (and potential customers) feel comfortable. We must let go of our ego (this matters) and of what appeals to us personally.

Why hire WebHeroe as your web designer

If you are looking for a professional, optimised web design, at WebHeroe we offer you:

1. 2-year warranty on all our projects.
2. 100% custom designs or templates as needed.
3. Integrated SEO to ensure strong rankings.
4. Full optimisation of speed, code and images.
5. Support and maintenance so you have nothing to worry about.
6. Expert consultancy to help you get the most from your website.