San Juan Capistrano Web Designer Hiring Checklist

Hiring a web designer is mostly a trust exercise. You are buying something you cannot inspect until it exists, from someone whose portfolio was chosen to look good. This is the checklist I would use if I were sitting on your side of the table, hiring for a service business in San Juan Capistrano.

Work through it in order. The first two items thin the field fast.

1. Start with local service work, not pretty pictures

Anyone can show you a beautiful site. What you need to see is a site built for a business that makes money the way yours does: a contractor, a plumber, a landscaper, a roofer, a shop that answers the phone and drives to the job.

Ask for live URLs, not screenshots. Then open them and look for the structure that actually produces calls:

• A separate page for every service, not one long list buried on the homepage.
• The phone number visible without scrolling on a phone, and tappable.
• Real photos of real work, not stock images of someone else's crew.
• An obvious next step on every page: call, text, or a short form.

Ask which parts of each site they actually built versus inherited, and ask what they would change about it today. A designer who has watched a site run for a year has opinions. One who hands off and disappears does not.

It is also fair to ask for a free preview of your own homepage before any money changes hands. Plenty of designers will build one. It tells you more about taste and speed than an hour of talking.

2. Make them explain how you show up in local search

Most of the calls you want start in the map pack, not on page one of the blue links. That means your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and whether your website backs both of those up. A designer who cannot talk about that is a decorator.

Good questions, in plain language:

• How will the site support my Google Business Profile?
• Will you build a page for each service and each city I actually serve?
• How will you keep my name, address, and phone number consistent everywhere it already appears online?
• What will you show me every month, and where does that number come from?

The San Juan Capistrano wrinkle: almost nobody here sells only inside the city limits. You are probably also working Dana Point, San Clemente, Capistrano Beach, Ladera Ranch, and Mission Viejo. Ask how the site covers that service area without turning into fifty near identical city pages, which is the lazy version and it does not hold up.

Ask for one client whose map ranking they moved, and ask to call that client. The answer to that request tells you almost everything.

3. Check the technical basics yourself, before the meeting

You do not need to be technical to do this, and it takes ten minutes.

Take two or three sites from their portfolio and run each one through Google PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab. You are not looking for a perfect score. You are looking for a pattern: if every site they build is slow on a phone, yours will be too.

Then open those same sites on your own phone, on cell service, not wifi. Tap the phone number. Submit the contact form with your own email and see whether anything arrives. Try to find their pricing or service area in under fifteen seconds. If you cannot, neither can your customer.

Two more questions worth asking out loud: what platform will my site be built on, and what happens if I ever leave? You want a clear answer about your domain, your content, and your photos before you sign, not after.

4. Get communication and support in writing

Most bad web projects are not design failures. They are communication failures: the client sends content into a void, nobody follows up, and four months later there is still no site.

Before you sign, pin down who your single point of contact is, how many rounds of revisions are included, what the timeline looks like with actual dates, and what you owe them so the project can move. That last one matters. Photos, service descriptions, and your license numbers usually come from you, and the project stalls when they do not.

Then handle after launch, which is the part people forget:

• Who updates the site when you add a service or change your hours, how fast, and at what cost.
• Who handles security, backups, and hosting, and who you call at 7am when the site is down.
• Who tests the contact form, and how often.

That last point is not filler. The single most common problem we find on sites built by someone else is a contact form that quietly stopped delivering leads months ago. Nothing errors. The customer sees a thank you message. The email never arrives, and the owner assumes business is slow.

5. Verify the reputation, then verify the verification

Ask for two or three references, ideally local, ideally in a trade. When you call them, skip the general questions and ask three specific ones: did the project finish on the date you were given, how long does it take to get a change made now, and would you hire them again.

Then go look at that reference's website yourself. Is it still live? Does it still look like the portfolio screenshot, or has it drifted into something broken and half updated? A designer who is proud of a project usually still has a relationship with it.

Read the Google reviews, but read them for content, not stars. Repeat complaints about missed deadlines or silence are the signal. So is how the owner responds to criticism. A calm, specific reply to a bad review tells you more than ten five star ratings.

6. Compare everyone on the same list

Once you have talked to a few people, write down the same seven lines for each of them and fill them in. It stops you from picking whoever you liked most in the meeting.

• Live sites built for local service businesses
• A page per service, and coverage of your real service area
• What they will do with your Google Business Profile
• Mobile speed on sites they already have live
• Platform, and what happens to your site if you leave
• Total first year cost: build, hosting, maintenance, and anything billed separately
• Support after launch, in writing

Price belongs on that list, but near the bottom. The cheap site that never ranks and never converts is the expensive one, because you pay for it twice: once to build it, and again in the calls it never generated.

Red flags

• Screenshots instead of live links. Either the site is gone or it was never theirs.
• A price with no scope. A number is not a proposal. You need page count, revision rounds, and a launch date.
• Vague SEO talk. If the whole plan is that they will optimize it for Google, there is no plan.
• Pressure to sign today. Good work is still available next week.
• No answer about after launch. The site is not the finish line, it is the starting line.

The short version

Hire the person who has built for businesses like yours, who can explain local search without hiding behind jargon, whose existing sites are fast on a phone, and who will still answer the phone in six months. Everything else on this list is a way of confirming those four things.

If you want a second opinion on a proposal you have already been handed, or you just want to see what your homepage could look like first, that is easy enough to arrange.