Wow, just seen an advert on facebook for a web design company offering websites from £249. On investigation the link turned out to be to a dedicated one page sales page with scrolling examples of their work – running their own site through Google page speed insights showed their mobile speed as 5% and their desktop speed as 35%. On their blog page they have an article explaining the importance of a speedy website. It contains an infographic which states “Customers are impatient, 47% expecting the website to load in less than 2 seconds”. Their site takes 27 seconds.

They have used a wordpress template for their own website.
Tells you a lot about the company. Broken links on their own site and when you try to read their privacy & cookie policy it goes nowhere.

I lose business to companies like this all the time but worse than that new business owners are taken for a ride.

Yes, they have a lovely looking templated wordpress website, but it doesn’t perform and they have basically thrown their money away. I really don’t like highlighting issues like this as it seems unprofessional but I now believe it is important to get the message out there that my line of business is full of companies like this so it is vital to vet your web designer before taking the plunge.

Here are a couple of things you can check before calling the designer to get a quote and more information.

Use https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to check the designers site. How good a score did they get?

Use http://whois.domaintools.com/  to check when they registered their domain name i.e have they just started in business. It’s worth asking the designer how long they have been in business to see if this checks out as they may very well have rebranded at some point.

Please feel free to check me out, I have been building websites for 14+ years but actually started my business in 2006  so you should find my website domain was registered then and the speed scores for my website, at the time of writing this blog post, are 60% mobile and 85% desktop (this will vary slightly depending upon server traffic)