Hiring a web developer is one of the few purchases where the buyer cannot evaluate the product. You see a portfolio of pretty screenshots, you get a price, you wire a deposit, and then you wait three months to find out whether you bought a Ferrari or a fiberglass shell painted to look like one.
The problem is that the things that matter — speed, code quality, accessibility, how the site behaves when you need to change it next year — are invisible at the moment of sale. The things you can see, like color choices and hero animations, do not predict the things you actually care about, like leads and longevity.
Here are five questions a small business owner can ask any developer in a short call. None of them require technical knowledge to evaluate. All of them filter out roughly 80% of the field.
1. "Show me a site you built, and let us run it through PageSpeed Insights together."
Open pagespeed.web.dev in a tab. Paste in their portfolio piece. Watch their face.
A good developer wants you to run this test. They have already run it themselves. They will explain what the numbers mean before you ask. The mobile Performance score on a real client site should be 85 or higher. The desktop score should be 95 or higher. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.
A bad developer will get defensive. They will tell you the scores "do not matter for your industry," or that "Google does not really care about that anymore." Both statements are false. Google has been ranking on Core Web Vitals since 2021, and the customer who closes your tab because your homepage takes seven seconds to render does not care what your industry is.
2. "What happens if I want to change the headline on the homepage in six months?"
This question separates the developers who build something you own from the ones who build something they own.
The good answer: "You log into the CMS, click the headline, type the new one, hit save. It is live in thirty seconds. I will show you how on launch day."
The bad answer: "Just send me an email and I will do it for you." That is not customer service. That is a leash. They are quoting you a $200/month maintenance retainer disguised as helpfulness, and they are doing it because the site they built cannot be edited by anyone but them.
The worst answer: silence, followed by a vague mention of "WordPress." WordPress is fine if it is configured well. It is also where 70% of cheap web work goes to die because the developer installed twenty-three plugins, half of which conflict, and now nothing can be touched without breaking something else.
3. "Can I see this site on your phone right now?"
Roughly 65% of small business web traffic is now mobile. So if the answer to this question involves any pinching, zooming, side-scrolling, or a hamburger menu that does not actually open, you are looking at a site that is failing the majority of its visitors.
Pay attention to typography especially. On a real phone, body text should be readable without zooming. Buttons should be thumb-sized. Forms should not require horizontal scrolling. Images should not push the layout around as they load.
If their own portfolio site fails this test, do not hire them to build yours.
4. "What is your accessibility score, and why?"
Accessibility — making sites usable for people with disabilities — is the canary in the developer-quality coal mine. A site with a 95+ accessibility score on Lighthouse was built carefully. A site with a 60 was thrown together.
You do not need to know the rules. You need to know whether the developer thinks about them. Ask. If they talk about color contrast, alt text on images, keyboard navigation, and semantic HTML, you have found someone who builds correctly. If they say "yeah I make sure it works for screen readers" without elaborating, they are guessing.
This matters legally too. ADA-related web accessibility lawsuits against small businesses have climbed every year for the last eight. A developer who has not thought about accessibility is exposing you to a category of risk you did not know you had.
5. "How are you going to measure whether the site is working?"
The bad answer: "It will look great." Or, "You will see more leads." Or, "Google will like it."
The good answer involves specifics. Conversion rate from landing page to contact form. Bounce rate by traffic source. Phone call tracking. Form submission analytics. Heatmaps on the highest-traffic pages. Monthly reports that show whether the thing is doing its job.
The site is not a piece of art. It is a worker. A developer who cannot tell you how to measure that worker's output is selling you decoration.
The meta-test
If you ask all five questions and the developer becomes annoyed, defensive, or condescending, that is the actual answer. Good developers love these questions because they make the case for them. Bad developers hate them because they expose what is missing.
The five-minute call is cheaper than the three-month rebuild.
Need a site that will pass all five of these tests on the day it launches? Send Magimatix a quick note about your project. We will tell you exactly how we would build it, and what the real numbers will look like — before you owe us a dollar.