Before hiring a web designer, find out whether the website is why your leads are slow. If it is, settle who the site is for and what you want a visitor to do, then decide who answers when they do it. Below is the order I’d work in, including the redirect step most owners hear about too late.
Before Hiring a Web Designer, Check Whether the Site Is the Problem
A new website only fixes slow leads if the old one is the reason they’re slow. Plenty of the time it isn’t. A site can look dated and still get people to call, and a polished one can sit there doing nothing because the phone number is buried or the form asks for too much.
Open your site on your phone, the way a customer standing in their driveway would. Can you tell what you do and where within a few seconds? Is the phone number one tap away? I walk through reading your own page in Website Conversion Rate: Why Nobody Calls You, and the fix there is often a copy change and an afternoon, not a rebuild. Run that check first. If the page passes, the money probably belongs somewhere else.
What to Settle Before You Pay a Designer
A designer builds what you’ve decided and fills every gap with a guess. So settle 2 things in writing before the first quote.
The first is who the site is for. A homeowner with a flooded basement wants something different from a property manager comparing bids, and a page written for both ends up working for neither. The second is the one thing you want a visitor to do. Call, fill out a short form, or book a time, but pick one to lead every page, because 5 equal buttons leave the visitor to decide for you.
I hear a version of this from owners a lot. They paid for a website, and it sits there as an expense when it should be working for them. Nine times out of ten when I get into a new client’s setup, the site, the Google profile and the inbox aren’t connected to each other, and a new design doesn’t change that.
Who Answers When Someone Fills Out the New Form
The site gets a person to reach you, and the next 10 minutes decide whether it paid for itself. I’ve looked at a home service business where every form on the site, from job applications to quote requests, landed with the same one person, and nothing happened after that. No reminder and no second person watching the inbox. The redesign gave them a nicer front door and the same leak behind it.
So decide before launch who gets each submission and what happens when they don’t reply. Ask your designer where each form sends its message, then fill one out yourself with your own number the day the site goes live. A lead that sits for a day is a better-looking way to lose a customer, and Turn Leads Into Customers: Why Yours Keep Going Quiet covers what to do once an inquiry lands.
We don’t build websites at Strategy Zoo, so I’m not selling you the redesign. What the Foundation Accelerator builds is the part behind it, the forms and follow-up sequences that send a new lead somewhere on purpose.
Why Old Web Addresses Need Redirects
If the new site changes your page addresses, each old address has to point to its new one. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new ones and says rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls and reindexes a significantly changed site. A designer who skips that step can hand you a site that looks great while the pages Google already sends people to return an error.
Before you sign, ask one plain question: how will you map the old addresses to the new ones? A designer who has done it before answers in a sentence. If the addresses aren’t changing, there’s less to do, but ask anyway. Keep the domain and hosting logins in your own name while you’re at it, so you can always move the site later.
Put It in a One-Page Brief Before Anyone Quotes
Hand every designer the same page. It says who the site is for, the one action you want, who answers the forms and how fast, how the old addresses get mapped, and that you hold the logins. The quotes that come back show you who actually read it, and a designer who asks smart questions about that page is worth more than one who sends a mockup.
If you want a second set of eyes on whether the site is really your bottleneck, book a free 30-minute Clarity Discovery Call. We’ll look at what’s slowing your leads and tell you whether a new site is the right next spend.
