Hiring a freelance web designer comes down to six steps: work out what you need, set a realistic budget, find two or three designers whose portfolios fit, ask them the right questions, compare proposals properly (not just on price), then agree scope, timeline and payment in writing before anything starts.
That’s the short version. The rest of this guide goes through each step in detail, with the prices, questions and warning signs I’d want a friend to know before they hired someone. I’ve been a freelance web designer since 2011 and have launched 200+ websites, so I’ve seen this from both sides of the table, including picking up the pieces when a hire went wrong.
Step 1: Work out what you actually need
Before you contact anyone, get clear on three things:
- The job the website has to do. Generate enquiries? Sell products? Take bookings? Make you look credible when someone Googles you after a meeting? One main job is better than five vague ones.
- Who it’s for. Who are your customers, and what do they need to find in the first ten seconds?
- What already exists. Your brand, logo, copy, photography, and any current site with its content and traffic.
You don’t need a 40-page spec. A one or two page brief beats a perfect one that never gets written. If you’ve never written one, I’ve put together a guide on how to write a web design brief with a template you can copy.
Step 2: Set a realistic budget
This is where most hires go sideways: the budget and the project don’t match, and nobody says so until the fifth call.
For a bespoke site from an experienced UK freelancer, these are the bands most projects fall into. They’re my own published prices, and they’re in line with the wider market:
| Project | Typical price |
|---|---|
| Small brochure site | £2,000 – £4,000 + VAT |
| Content-driven site (blog, resources, landing pages) | £4,000 – £8,000 + VAT |
| Custom builds and eCommerce | From £5,000 + VAT |
| Managed monthly package (build, hosting and care) | From £250/month + VAT |
Across the UK market, freelance web designers charge roughly £25–£120 an hour and £200–£550 a day, depending on experience (ExpertSure, 2026). I go through where those numbers come from in my UK freelance web designer rates guide, and what drives the final figure in how much does a website cost?
Don’t forget the running costs after launch: hosting, domain, and maintenance. If your site runs on WordPress, budget for website maintenance too.
Step 3: Decide between a freelancer, an agency, an in-house hire or a website builder
Each one suits a different situation.
A freelancer is the right fit for most small and medium businesses. You deal directly with the person designing and building your site, decisions are quick, and you aren’t paying for an office, account managers and a sales team. The trade-off: one person has limited capacity, so good freelancers are often booked a few weeks out.
An agency makes sense for very large projects, tight deadlines that need several people working in parallel, or when you need a big multi-disciplinary team (brand, content, paid media, development) under one roof. Expect to pay more for that. I’ve written a full comparison of freelance web designer vs agency.
An in-house designer only makes sense if you’ll keep them busy all year. You’re paying a salary, pension and equipment for the quiet months as well as the busy ones.
A website builder like Wix or Squarespace can work for a hobby, a side project, or a business that’s still testing an idea. It gets expensive in time, and limiting in what you can do, once the site matters. I break down where that line sits in website builder vs web designer.
Step 4: Find designers worth talking to
The best places to look, roughly in order:
- Recommendations. Ask businesses you rate who built their site, and whether they’d hire them again.
- Sites you like. Scroll to the footer of websites you admire. Many have a “website by” credit.
- Google. Searching “freelance web designer” plus your town or industry works, but check reviews before you contact anyone.
- Directories and marketplaces. Clutch, Sortlist and similar sites show reviews. Fiverr and Upwork are fine for small tasks, but the bidding model tends to reward cheap over good for a whole website.
Aim for a shortlist of two or three. Contacting ten people means ten sets of calls and ten proposals to compare, and you’ll learn very little extra from the last seven.
Do they need to be near me?
Searching “web designers near me” is natural, but location matters far less than it used to. Most of my projects run on video calls, shared boards and email, with clients in London, Hertfordshire, Essex and well beyond, and they go just as smoothly as the ones where we meet in person.
What matters is that they’re reachable during your working hours, they understand your market, and you can meet them if you want to. A local designer you never hear from is worse than a remote one who replies the same day.
Step 5: Check them properly
A good-looking portfolio is the start of the check, not the end of it.
- Look at live sites, not screenshots. Open them on your phone. Are they fast? Can you find what you need?
- Look for work like yours. Not the same industry necessarily, but a similar size and type of project.
- Read the reviews, and ask for a reference you can actually speak to.
- Ask how they build. Bespoke design, or a premium theme with your logo dropped in? Both exist at very different prices, so make sure you know which one you’re being quoted for.
- Check they’ll be around afterwards. Who fixes things after launch, and how fast?
I’ve put the full list in questions to ask a web designer before you hire them, with what a good answer sounds like for each.
Red flags
- No portfolio, or only mock-ups. Everyone starts somewhere, but you shouldn’t be their first real project.
- A price before they understand the project. A quote that arrives before a single question is a template being sold.
- “£500 for a fully bespoke website”. At that price you’re getting a theme. That’s not always wrong, but it isn’t bespoke. My post on why templates can hurt your business explains the catch.
- They want to own your domain, hosting or site. Your domain and your content should always be in your name.
- No contract, or 100% upfront. Professional freelancers work to a written agreement with staged payments.
- Slow, vague replies before you’ve paid. Communication rarely improves after the deposit clears.
Step 6: Compare proposals and agree the details
When the proposals come in, compare what’s included, not just the total. Check each one covers:
- Scope: the pages, features and integrations, written down.
- Content: who’s writing the copy and supplying the images. If it’s you, when?
- Design rounds: how many rounds of changes are included.
- Timeline: the milestones, not just a launch date. A small brochure site is usually 2–4 weeks of work; a CMS site 4–8; eCommerce longer.
- Payment: I take 50% to book the project in and 50% on completion, before the site goes live. Staged payments like that are standard.
- Ownership: you own the site, the content and the domain.
- After launch: hosting, maintenance and support, and what they cost.
The cheapest proposal is often the one with the most missing from it. The extras turn up later as change requests.
What happens after you hire them?
With me, it goes like this:
- An initial chat to understand your business, goals and what you actually need (not what you think you need).
- A clear proposal with scope, timeline and cost. No vague estimates.
- Design, feedback, build and testing. You see progress throughout, not just at the end.
- Launch, then hosting, maintenance and support so it keeps working.
Other freelancers run things differently, but if someone can’t explain their process in a few sentences, ask why.
What if it isn’t working out?
It happens. If you’re unhappy, say so early and specifically. “The homepage feels cluttered and the blue is off-brand” is fixable. “I don’t love it” isn’t. Most problems are a misunderstanding of the brief, and a call sorts them out.
If it’s really not working, check your agreement for how ending the project works, pay for the work done, and make sure you get the files, logins and domain access before you part ways. Plenty of my clients came to me after a previous designer disappeared, so it’s recoverable.
Hiring a freelance web designer: the checklist
- One main goal for the site, written down
- A realistic budget for the build and the running costs
- A one-page brief
- A shortlist of two or three designers
- Live portfolio sites checked on your phone
- A reference you’ve spoken to
- A written proposal with scope, timeline, payments and ownership
- A plan for after launch
If you’d like me to be one of the two or three on your shortlist, you can get an instant price or see my pricing. I’m a freelance web designer who has been designing and building websites since 2011, and I’ll always tell you straight if I’m not the right fit.
