Hiring a Freelance WordPress Developer in Hertfordshire: What to Ask Before You Do

“WordPress developer Hertfordshire” turns up a mix of agencies, marketplaces, and one-person operations like mine — and the range in what you actually get for your money is wider here than the search results make it look. A few direct questions before you commit will tell you more than any portfolio page.

“Who will I actually be speaking to?”

At an agency, the person who pitches you is rarely the person who builds the site. You’ll often deal with an account manager relaying your notes to a developer you never speak to directly — which means every change goes through a layer of translation, and every misunderstanding costs a round trip. With a freelancer, ask plainly whether it’s genuinely one person start to finish, or whether the work gets subcontracted out once you’ve signed. Both can produce a good result. Only one of them means the person answering your emails actually understands the code underneath your site.

“Is this a template, or is it actually built for us?”

A huge share of “custom” WordPress sites are a page-builder theme with a logo swapped in and a few colours changed. There’s nothing wrong with that for a very simple brochure site — but if your business has any real logic to it (bookings, a product catalogue, membership tiers, an integration with something else you already use), ask specifically how that gets handled. “We’ll find a plugin for that” is a different answer, and a different risk, than “I’ll build that as a proper custom feature.” Neither is automatically wrong, but you should know which one you’re paying for.

“What happens after launch?”

This is the question most businesses forget to ask, and the one that costs them most a year later. WordPress sites need ongoing attention — plugin updates, security patching, the odd thing that breaks when a third-party service changes its API. Ask what that looks like concretely: is there a maintenance plan, who’s on it, and what’s covered versus billed separately. A developer who goes quiet the day after launch is a common enough pattern locally that it’s worth asking about directly, not assuming.

“Can I see something you built that’s still live, still yours?”

Portfolios go stale. Ask for sites that are both still online and still maintained by the person you’d be hiring — not a project from three years ago that’s since been rebuilt by someone else because the original build didn’t hold up. A developer confident in their own work will point you to something recent without hesitation.

“Do you understand what my business actually does?”

This sounds obvious, but it’s the fastest way to separate a developer who listens from one who’s already decided what you need before you’ve finished explaining it. A good discovery conversation should feel like it’s about your business — your customers, your bottlenecks, what’s actually slowing enquiries down — not a features checklist read out in order. If the first meeting is entirely about templates and page counts, that’s a preview of how the whole project will go.

Why local still matters, even for a fully remote industry

None of this work requires being in the same town. But there’s a real, practical difference between a developer who’s driven past your shop, understands the local competition, and can meet face-to-face when something needs a proper conversation, versus one who’s never set foot in Hertfordshire and never will. It doesn’t replace technical competence — it’s not a substitute for the questions above — but weighed evenly between two developers who both answer well, it’s a reasonable tiebreaker.

I cover Hertfordshire generally, with dedicated work in Watford, St Albans, and Welwyn Garden City — but wherever you end up hiring, ask the five questions above before you sign anything. They’ll tell you more in ten minutes than an hour of scrolling portfolios will.