7 Questions to Ask Before You Pay Anyone to Build Your Website

1. What is the total cost in year one and year two?

Not the build price. The full number, including hosting, maintenance, content, and anything else recurring — for 12 months and then for 24.

A good answer is a specific dollar figure you can repeat back. A bad answer is 'it depends on scope' after you have already described your business, or a build price with the monthly fee mentioned casually at the end.

Our version: $750 build for up to 5 pages, $50 per extra page, $50 a month hosting starting 30 days after checkout. A 5-page site is $1,350 in year one and $600 a year after that. Optional add-ons are the $500 blog pack and Google Ads pricing.

2. What exactly does the monthly fee cover?

Ask for it itemized. Hosting is a real cost. 'Ongoing optimization' usually is not, unless someone can tell you what got optimized last month for a business like yours.

Watch for a monthly fee in the hundreds attached to a site nobody touches after launch. That is not maintenance. That is rent on a finished asset — and it is the single biggest drain on local marketing budgets right now.

3. What do I own, and what happens if I leave?

Three things need to be in your name from day one: your domain, your Google Business Profile, and your Google Ads account. If a provider registers your domain under their account, that is a red flag with no good explanation.

Then ask what leaving looks like. Is there a minimum term? An early termination fee? Does the site come with you, and what does that cost?

Ours, plainly: your domain, content, and ad account are yours. The site runs on our AI platform, which is how the price stays this low. If you want it moved to hosting you control, that is $500 one time for the engineering work to export and hand it over properly — not a penalty, and not a surprise. Cancel with 30 days' notice by email. No contract to buy out.

4. How long will it take, and what causes delays?

Get a number of days or weeks, and get the list of things that could push it. Most website delays are not technical — they are waiting on content, waiting on approvals, and open-ended revision rounds.

A good answer sounds like: 'Five to seven days once we have your brief and photos, plus one revision round.' A bad answer is 'eight to twelve weeks depending on the design process,' which usually means your project sits in a queue behind bigger clients.

Also ask how many revision rounds are included and what an extra one costs. Unlimited revisions sounds generous and is how a two-week build becomes a five-month build.

5. Who writes the content, and how many pages am I getting?

This is the question that catches the most people. Plenty of quotes assume you will supply all the copy. Then the project stalls for months because writing 12 pages about your own business turns out to be hard.

• —Who writes each page — you, them, or AI with human review?
• —How many pages are included, and what does an extra page cost?
• —Do I get individual service pages, or one page listing everything?
• —Do I get city or service-area pages?
• —Is schema markup included so AI assistants can read the site?

Page count matters more than most owners realize. One 'services' page cannot compete with a competitor who has a dedicated page per service. If a quote is vague about page count, it is vague about the thing that determines whether the site gets found.

6. How will we know if this is working?

Push past traffic and leads. Ask how booked jobs and revenue will be attributed to the site, and whether you get direct access to your analytics and ad accounts.

Lead counts are easy to inflate — duplicates across channels, brand-name searches, newsletter signups counted as inquiries. Booked jobs are not. If the plan for measuring success is a monthly call where someone reads you a traffic chart, that is reporting theater.

What you want: your own account access, plain reporting you can read alone, and a clear answer to 'how many of these inquiries became customers.'

7. What is your refund or guarantee policy?

Ask before you pay, not after you are unhappy. Most build contracts make deposits non-refundable and treat the rest as owed regardless of outcome.

Ours: if you ask within 30 days of checkout, you get 100% of your AXF fees back. Google ad spend is not refundable by us because it goes directly to Google from your own account. That is the whole policy.

A provider unwilling to put any guarantee in writing is telling you how confident they are.

Bonus: the question you should not have to ask

'What does it cost?' should already be answered on the website. If getting a price requires a discovery call, a proposal, and a follow-up sequence, the price is being set based on what they think you can pay.

That is why our pricing is published and checkout is self-serve. No sales call pushing a retainer, no proposal deck, no pressure. You can:

• —Run the free audit to see where your current site stands.
• —Run the page planner to get a recommended page count and price for your services and cities.
• —Run the savings calculator to compare against what you pay now.
• —Run the ad planner if you want Google Ads sized to your real budget.
• —Check out when you are ready. The 30-minute call with a marketing specialist happens after you buy, as part of your brief.