How to Choose a WordPress Developer for Your Business

A portfolio tells you what someone's best work looks like when everything went well. It tells you almost nothing about what happens when it does not.

These questions are more useful.

The four that matter most

1. "Who will own the hosting account and domain?"

The only acceptable answer is that you do. A developer who registers your domain in their own name, or hosts your site on their reseller account with no path to move it, has made leaving them expensive. That may not be the intent, but it is the effect.

2. "What happens to my existing URLs?"

If you have a site with any search visibility, this is the question that protects it. A good answer involves mapping old URLs to new ones and setting up redirects. A shrug means your rankings are about to be an experiment. The full process is in website migration and SEO preservation.

3. "Which parts will I be able to edit myself?"

Get specifics. "It's WordPress so you can edit everything" is not an answer — plenty of builds put the important content in places a non-technical person cannot safely touch. Ask to see the editing interface for a page like yours.

4. "If I stop working with you, what do I have?"

The answer should be: the code, the database, the hosting account, the domain, and documentation. Anything less means you are renting.

Questions about the work itself

• What is your plugin policy? Look for someone who treats each plugin as a cost. Twenty-five plugins on a brochure site is a warning.
• What performance target do you build to, and how do you measure it? "It'll be fast" is not a target. A number, measured on mobile, is.
• How do you handle content? Who writes it, when it is needed, and what happens to the timeline if it is late.
• What does the handover include? A walkthrough, credentials, and a written record of how things are set up.
• What does support cost after launch, and is it optional? It should be optional. Bundled support you cannot decline is a retainer with extra steps.

Answers that should worry you

• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A provider who promises a position is either inexperienced or willing to tell you what you want to hear — and neither is what you want building your site.
• "We'll handle the domain for you." Fine if it ends with the domain in your name. Ask.
• No written scope. The scope is the only thing that makes "is this finished?" answerable.
• A quote with no questions asked first. Someone who can price your project without understanding it is pricing a template.
• Portfolio links that are dead or now show a different site. Worth checking. It happens more than you would expect.

Comparing quotes that look nothing alike

When three quotes come back at £600, £2,400 and £7,000, they are usually for three different projects rather than three prices for one project.

Normalise them by asking each provider the same three questions:

1. Is this a configured theme, a builder layout, or custom templates?
2. Is there a defined content model, or are pages built individually?
3. What is included in the price that is not in the others?

The price gap almost always resolves into a scope gap once you do. What a WordPress website costs in the UK breaks down what sits inside each band.

A note on reviews and social proof

Check that testimonials correspond to real, findable businesses. Check that case studies name what was done rather than only what it achieved. A case study full of percentages and light on method is a marketing asset, not evidence.

This site removed six case studies and eight testimonials in 2026 for exactly that reason — they had shipped as placeholder content and none of it was real. The write-up of that clean-up is at auditing and rebuilding this site's technical SEO, and it is a reasonable model for the level of specificity to expect from anyone else's.

If you want a written quote with the scope spelled out, the contact page is the place to start.