What you're actually paying for.
A quote for a website gives you a price and a date. It doesn't say what the site's made of, where it lives, whose name the domain ends up in, or what a monthly fee is renting you. You can find all of that out before you sign anything and none of it needs you to be technical.
I'm in Bridgend, working across South Wales and remotely anywhere in the UK.
Five things to check before you pay anyone
All five fit in one email, and a couple you can check yourself without asking. None of them have one right answer. What matters is whether the person quoting you can tell you.
Can I see the source?
Open a page they've built, right-click, View Page Source. That's roughly what a search engine gets when it comes to look. A good answer is that your words are sat there as readable text, so the whole page arrives on the first visit without anything having to run first.
Where's it hosted, and who owns the domain?
Ask which company hosts the site, which country it sits in, and whose name the domain is in. You can check the domain yourself with a WHOIS lookup and the free check on this site does the hosting part. A good answer names the host, puts the domain in your name and hands you the login.
What does the monthly fee cover?
Ask for it broken down: hosting, domain, edits, support, software licences. If somebody's charging you sixty quid a month (£720 a year!), it's worth knowing which bit of that is hosting and which bit is everything else. A good answer separates the lines and says what happens to the site the month you stop paying.
How is email set up?
Ask whether your email runs on your own domain and whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place. Those three are what keeps your quotes out of spam and stops other people sending mail as you. A good answer is a real mailbox on your domain with all three done, and somebody who can show you the reports coming back.
What happens if I leave?
Ask what you'd walk away with: the domain, the code, the content, the hosting account. Some sites are built on a platform the builder owns, so leaving means paying somebody to build it again. Much easier to hear that at the start than two years in. A good answer is every account has your name on it and you can pass the logins to whoever comes next.
Two of these you can answer today
Put your domain into the free check and it tells you where the site's hosted, what it's built with, what a search engine actually gets and whether your email is setup right. Takes about ten seconds, nothing is installed and nothing on your site is touched. Run the free check.
If the email records come back failing, which is the most common thing it finds, that's worth reading about on its own. If it's the site, here's how I build them.
How I work
You're welcome to read the code I ship. Open the source on this page and you'll find plain HTML with the words in it, same as I'd hand you.
I use AI tools while I work, same way I use an editor and a terminal, they make me quicker. They don't design the site and nothing they produce ships without me reading it first. So when something breaks at eleven at night it's breaking in code I understand.
Sites I build sit on Cloudflare's network and I tell you what that costs before we start. For most sites I build there's no ongoing hosting cost, and no monthly retainer with somebody else's hosting bill folded into it.
Email goes on your own custom domain, setup properly so it arrives. Domain in your name, code yours, hosting account in your name too. Want to move the whole lot somewhere else next year, you can do that without asking me.
I've spent fifteen years in tech, including global payments infrastructure and running production systems at scale, where an outage means somebody's money doesn't move that day. A small business website is a far smaller thing and it gets looked after the same way. The person who answers the message is the person who signs the contract and does the work.
Ask me the same five questions.
I'd rather you asked everyone you're talking to, me included. If you want to see where your current site stands before you speak to anybody, the check is free and I'll tell you what's worth fixing and what you can leave alone.