How to hire a freelance web developer

Younes K.Freelance web developer

I build websites, online shops and custom applications for businesses.

Published on 16 September 2026

See my work →

Hiring a freelance web developer is mostly a problem of confidence. You are about to pay someone four figures for something you cannot judge on sight, on the strength of a portfolio you have no real way of verifying. The reassuring part is that almost everything worth knowing shows up before the contract, in the way the person answers ordinary questions. Here is what to look at, roughly in the order it matters.

I am a freelance web developer myself — I build brochure sites, online shops and custom tools for small businesses — so read this as a guide written from the other side of the table. It contains the questions I would rather be asked, and one or two that would cost me a job if I answered them badly. None of it is a trick: a developer worth hiring has no reason to dread any of these.

Where to look

• Referrals from other business owners near you. The signal is strong because someone already paid this person and is still willing to put their name on it. Ask what went wrong as well as what went well — every project has something.
• LinkedIn, searching your trade plus your town. You get the work history, the recommendations and a sense of how the person writes, for free, before you send a single message.
• A plain search for “freelance web developer” and your town. Anyone ranking well for that has quietly proved they can make a site visible — their own.
• Marketplaces such as Upwork, Fiverr or PeoplePerHour. Genuinely useful for a small, well-defined job. Much less so for a whole site: the platform pushes towards the lowest price, and the developer knows it.
• The trade communities you already belong to — a restaurant group, a trades association, a local business network. The people in them have already bought what you are about to buy.

One thing worth knowing about marketplace profiles: they are ranked on response time and review count, not on how good the work is. A five-star seller with 400 reviews has mostly proved they can deliver 400 small jobs quickly. That is a real skill, and it is not the same skill as building a site that still makes sense in three years.

Four things to check before anything else

1. Work you can open in a browser

Screenshots are not proof. Ask for the live addresses of sites the person built, open three of them on your phone, and start with the ones closest to your line of work. You are checking simple things: does it load quickly, does it read properly on a small screen, do you understand within five seconds what that business sells. If half the portfolio no longer exists, that tells you those clients moved on — and it is fair to ask why.

2. Whether they can explain without initials

Ask what hosting actually is, or why the site needs a way for you to edit it. You will get one of two answers: a plain one you understand, or a wall of acronyms. The second is not a sign of depth, it is a warning about what the next eighteen months will feel like every time you have a simple question. You do not have to become technical. They do have to stop being obscure.

3. Whether they ask about your business before your budget

The first real question should be about what you sell and who buys it, not about how much you have to spend. Someone who quotes before knowing whether your customers find you on a phone at eight in the evening or through a wholesaler is quoting a template. Listen too for whether they ever tell you that something you asked for is a bad idea. A developer who agrees with everything is planning to invoice everything.

4. A quote with lines in it

A single figure is a number, not a quote. You want the pages listed one by one, who writes the texts, whether the design is a template or drawn for you, how many rounds of changes are included, whose name the domain and the hosting go in, what happens after launch, and what you keep if the project stops halfway. Anyone serious sends that back within a few days, and the request itself tells you a great deal about how the work will go.

Before you compare quotes, know the ranges: what a website really costs in 2026

Seven questions to ask before you sign

1. Can I see three sites you built that are still online, ideally for businesses like mine?
2. Who will actually do the work — you, or someone you pass it to?
3. Who owns the domain name, the hosting account and the site itself when we are finished?
4. If I want to change a price or add a page myself, is that possible, is it trained, and is it billed?
5. What is your usual reply time, and what do I do if the site breaks on a Saturday?
6. What is not in this quote that I am likely to need within a year?
7. Have you had a project go wrong, and what happened next?

The last one is the most useful and the least expected. Everyone has had a project go sideways; someone who claims otherwise is either very new or not being straight with you. What you are listening for is not the disaster, it is whether they can describe what they changed in their own working afterwards.

How to read a day rate

Most independent developers in Europe and North America quote somewhere between €250 and €700 a day, and where someone sits in that range says less about skill than people assume. It mostly reflects where they live, how specialised they are and how much of their year is already booked.

• Below €250 a day you are usually buying either a beginner or someone based where the cost of living is much lower. Both can work out well. Both are reasons to scope the job tightly and pay in stages rather than up front.
• €300 to €500 a day is where most experienced independents sit for small-business work. A five-page brochure site at that rate lands somewhere between four and ten days.
• Above €600 a day you are paying for a specialism — a particular kind of shop, a regulated industry, rescuing a site someone else abandoned. Worth every cent when that is what you have, expensive when it is not.

What matters more than the rate is the estimate attached to it. A €600 rate with a five-day estimate costs less than a €300 rate with fifteen days, and the second is far more likely to drift. Always ask for the rate and the number of days, then compare the totals — never the rates on their own. And if the answer is a fixed price rather than a day rate, that is usually better for you: the risk of the estimate being wrong sits with them.

The red flags

• “First place on Google, guaranteed.” Nobody controls that ranking, so nobody can promise it.
• A price given in the first five minutes, before a single question about your business.
• A very low monthly fee tied to a three or four year commitment. Multiply it by the full term before you compare it with a purchase price.
• Nothing in writing about who owns the domain, the hosting and the site at the end.
• Payment in full up front. A deposit of a third is normal practice; the whole amount is not.
• A quote three times below every other one you received. Something has been left out of it — usually the content, the search visibility work, or both.
• No written agreement at all, in either direction, on a four-figure job.

If you are torn between two, buy something small first

When two candidates both look reasonable on paper, buy a small piece of work from each: a single page, a fix to something already broken, an hour of advice on the site you have. It costs a few hundred euros, it is not wasted whichever way you go, and in a week you learn what no reference call will tell you — how quickly they reply, whether the estimate held, and whether you actually enjoyed the exchange. You are about to spend several months in contact with this person, and that last part counts more than most people expect.

How I can help

I build and look after websites for small businesses, as a freelancer, and I would rather be judged on the criteria above than on a sales pitch. Concretely, I take on:

• brochure sites, from a simple five-page version to a fully written one;
• online shops, including payment, delivery options and stock;
• custom sites, applications and internal tools when the off-the-shelf products do not fit the way you work;
• redesigns of an existing site, without losing the place it already holds in search results;
• monthly upkeep for a site that is already online: updates, checked backups, someone noticing when it breaks.

Tell me what your business does and what the site has to achieve, and you get a detailed quote — the pages listed, what is included, what is not — within 24 hours. The first conversation is free and commits you to nothing, including in the cases where my honest answer is that you need something simpler than hiring anyone.

The proof rather than the promise: see the sites and tools I have built

Have a project in mind? Describe it and get a detailed quote within 24 hours

Aussi disponible en français : comment trouver un développeur web freelance

Frequently asked questions

In short

Hiring a freelance web developer well comes down to four habits: look where people have already paid someone rather than where profiles are ranked by response time, open their actual sites on your own phone, ask the seven questions above before signing anything, and compare totals rather than day rates. The red flags — a guaranteed ranking, a price before any question, silence about who owns the domain — all appear in the first conversation, which is precisely why that conversation is worth having slowly. And if two candidates are still tied, buy a day from each: a week of real work tells you more than any reference ever will.