The uncomfortable part of my job is being the second developer. Someone calls, and what they need is not a new website — it is an explanation of what happened to the money they already spent.

The stories rhyme. A school pays a decent sum for a site that turns out to be a free template with the school’s name typed into it. A hotel discovers its booking enquiries have been going nowhere for a year. A clinic finds out their developer has stopped answering, and nobody in the building has the hosting password.

None of these people were careless. They did what anyone would do: they asked around, got a quote that seemed reasonable, and trusted the person in front of them. The problem is that our industry has no licensing, no register, and no consequence for doing bad work — so the burden of telling good from bad falls entirely on the buyer.

Here is what I would want a business owner to know before signing anything.

Ask what it is built on, and get a straight answer

“WordPress” is not an answer on its own. Ask whether it is a custom-built theme or a page builder like Elementor or Divi on top of a purchased template.

Page builders are not evil, and plenty of competent people use them. But you should know, because it determines what you own afterwards. A builder site typically depends on a paid licence — if that licence lapses, parts of your site can stop working or stop updating. It also means the actual design work may have been “picked a template and changed the colours”, which is a legitimate service if that is what you are paying for, and a rip-off if you are being charged for custom design.

The question to ask: “If I stop paying you, does my website keep working exactly as it is?” The answer should be an immediate yes.

Insist that the domain and hosting are in your name

I have put this second because it is the single most damaging thing that goes wrong.

Your domain must be registered in your business name, on an account you control, with a password you hold. Same for hosting. You can absolutely let your developer manage both day to day — that is normal and sensible — but the account must be yours.

Get this in writing before work starts. A developer who resists, or who explains that it is “easier” to keep everything on their account, is describing a situation that is easier for them and dangerous for you.

Get the scope in writing, with a date and a number

Not an estimate. Not “around forty to sixty thousand, depending”. A fixed price, a list of what is included, and a delivery date.

The list should name the actual pages, and should be explicit about the things that quietly become “extra” later: contact form, WhatsApp button, Google Maps, payment gateway, booking system, image optimisation, mobile layout, SSL setup, Google Search Console, and who writes the content.

That last one causes more delays than any technical problem. If nobody has agreed who writes the words, the project stalls for months and both sides feel wronged.

Ask to see three sites they built, and open them on your phone

Not screenshots. Not a design portfolio. Live addresses you can visit.

Then do the same thing I described in the checklist above: open them on mobile data, time how long they take, run one through PageSpeed Insights, and try the contact form. You are not judging whether you like the colours. You are checking whether the work functions.

If a developer cannot name three live sites, that is worth pausing over. Everyone starts somewhere, and there is nothing wrong with hiring someone early in their career — but you should be paying an early-career price and know that is what you are doing.

Agree what happens after launch, before launch

Websites are not furniture. They need updates, backups, security patches and the occasional fix.

Ask directly: what happens if something breaks at 9pm on a Saturday? Is there a maintenance charge, and what does it cover? How many rounds of changes are included after launch, and what does a change cost after that?

Vagueness here is not generosity. It is where the relationship goes wrong four months later, when you think a fix is covered and they think it is billable.

Ask for the handover, in writing, on day one

When the project ends you should receive: the domain registrar login, the hosting login, the WordPress administrator account, and the source code. Ideally also a short screen recording showing your staff how to update content themselves.

If you have those four things, you are safe. You can hire anyone in the world to continue the work. If you do not have them, you are dependent on one person’s continued goodwill and availability, and that is a business risk sitting quietly on your balance sheet.

The warning signs I would walk away from

Won’t give you the domain login, or wants the domain in their name
Quotes a price but won’t put the scope in writing
Cannot show you three live sites they built
Pressures you to decide today, or offers a discount that expires this week
Cannot explain what your site is built on in plain language
Says search engine optimisation is “included” but cannot say what that means concretely
Charges monthly for a site you were told you would own

Why this matters more here than it should

In a metro, a bad web project is annoying. For a school in a small town, or a family-run hotel, it can be a meaningful chunk of a year’s marketing budget — and the opportunity cost is worse than the money. Every month a school’s site does not appear in search for “admission” in its own town, parents are finding somebody else instead.

The gap is not talent. There are very good developers in Bengal. The gap is that nobody tells business owners what to ask for, so the same avoidable failures repeat in town after town.

Take this list into your next conversation. A developer worth hiring will be glad you asked — clear expectations make our work easier too. And if the answers are evasive, you have learned that for free, which is the cheapest lesson available.

How to hire a web developer in Bengal without getting burned