Hiring

Red Flags When Hiring a Web Designer

Very few website projects go wrong because someone set out to defraud you. Most go wrong because a person took on more work than they could finish, or because nobody wrote down what "a website" meant. The warning signs for both look almost identical from the outside — which is useful, because it means one checklist catches both.

Which red flags should end the conversation?

Three, and they are all about what happens when things go badly rather than when things go well.

1. Full payment upfront, with nothing built. A deposit is normal and reasonable — roughly half, with the balance at launch, or milestone payments on a bigger build. What is not reasonable is handing over the entire amount before a single page exists. The deposit structure is the only leverage you have if the work stops, and a designer who is confident of finishing has no reason to remove it.

Watch for the softer version too: a small "design fee" followed by escalating requests for more money before anything is shown to you.

2. Vagueness about ownership. Ask who the domain will be registered to and whose hosting account the site will sit on. A straight answer takes seconds. If you get "don't worry, we handle all of that," ask again in writing. If it is still evasive, stop — this is the mechanism behind almost every horror story where a business cannot update its own website or, worse, loses its email when a relationship sours.

3. A portfolio that does not load. Open five links from their portfolio. If two or three are dead, parked, or now show a different company, something is wrong: either the work was never theirs, or their clients keep leaving. Both are your problem.

Any one of those three is enough on its own. You do not need to be rude about it — "thanks, I'm going to go a different direction" is a complete sentence.

Which warning signs are worth a question first?

These are the ambers. Each one has an innocent explanation, and the way someone responds when you raise it tells you more than the flag itself.

The pattern worth noticing: almost every amber turns green the moment someone answers plainly and in writing. The problem is never that a designer uses templates or works alone or charges little. The problem is when you cannot get a straight answer about what you are buying. Our list of 12 questions to ask before paying a deposit is built around exactly that principle.

One more that catches South African business owners specifically: a designer who has never mentioned WhatsApp. If someone is building for a local service business and has not asked how you want enquiries to reach you, they are building a brochure. Nearly every trade enquiry in this country arrives by phone or WhatsApp, not by contact form — the reason we take it apart in detail on our page for plumbers.

What is not a red flag, despite what you'll read?

Plenty of hiring advice online is written by agencies whose interest is in making cheaper competitors look dangerous. Some of the most-repeated warnings are just marketing.

"They use templates." Not a red flag. A well-set-up template with good copy beats a rushed custom build most days of the week. The relevant question is whether the structure suits your business, which we cover in custom vs template.

"They work alone." Most of the best small-business web work in South Africa comes from one or two people. Solo carries availability risk, not quality risk, and you manage it by owning your assets.

"They're cheap." Cheap usually means a narrower scope, not worse work. Add the exclusions back and compare properly — the method is in how to compare website quotes. Sometimes the cheap quote genuinely is the right buy.

"They're not in your city." Irrelevant in 2026. Understanding your customers matters; proximity does not.

"They don't have a big team page." A team page is a marketing asset, not evidence of capability.

Be equally sceptical in the other direction. A polished sales process, a slick proposal PDF and a large office prove that a business can sell — not that the person who ends up building your site is any good. Judge the work and the answers, not the packaging.

How do you protect yourself before paying?

Five things, none of which require a lawyer.

Register the domain yourself. Ten minutes, and it removes the single largest risk in the entire transaction. If your designer has already registered it, ask for the registrar login before the deposit goes out.

Get the scope in an email. Not a contract necessarily — an email listing pages, who writes copy, revision rounds, launch date, ownership and support, which they reply to confirming. That exchange is worth a great deal if there is ever a dispute.

Pay in stages, and pay traceably. Deposit, midpoint, launch. Use EFT so there is a record. Be wary of pressure to pay into a personal account when you were quoted by a business.

Ask what happens if you cancel at each stage. A reasonable answer exists — usually you forfeit the deposit and keep whatever has been produced. An unreasonable answer, or no answer, tells you what you need to know.

Phone one old client. Ten minutes, more informative than everything else combined. Ask specifically: did they reply after launch when something broke?

What if you're already stuck?

This is the situation more South African business owners are in than admit it: a site half-built, a designer who has gone quiet, and no clarity on who owns what.

Work through it in this order. First, find out what you control. Look up your domain in a public WHOIS lookup to see the registrant. Check whether you have any hosting login. If you control the domain, you are in a strong position regardless of how the rest goes.

Second, make one clear written request. Email — not WhatsApp — asking for the registrar login, hosting access, and a copy of the site files, with a reasonable deadline. Keep it factual and unemotional. A surprising number of stalled projects unstick at this point, because the designer is not malicious, just overwhelmed.

Third, if there is no reply, cut your losses early. The instinct is to chase the money already spent. Usually the cheaper path is to register a fresh domain if you must, rebuild, and treat the loss as tuition. Website work is not expensive enough to justify months of legal effort, and the months cost you more than the build did.

Fourth, protect the search visibility you have. If an old site is still live and ranking, do not let it be switched off before a replacement exists. Losing an established page without a redirect is a genuine cost, and recovering local visibility can take months — see our Google Business Profile guide for the local search side of a switchover.

And when you hire the replacement, run the checklist properly. Nearly everyone who has been burned once hires far better the second time — mostly because they finally ask about ownership. Our full process is in how to hire a web designer in South Africa.