Web Design Red Flags I See Every Week

I look at other people's web-design situations constantly — business owners send me their sites, their contracts, their invoices, asking whether they're getting robbed. The patterns repeat so reliably that I could sort a stack of them blindfolded. None of these red flags requires inside knowledge to spot. You just have to know they're red flags instead of normal. So: the ones I see every week.

The price hides behind a call

You go to the website of a web-design company and there is no price. Anywhere. Just a form and a promise to "discuss your needs." That's not caution about scope — plenty of scoped work can carry a published floor. It's a negotiation tactic. The price is being withheld so it can be set against you once they've gauged your budget on the call. This one's so common it's practically the industry default around here — nobody in this market publishes pricing, and the opacity is a choice, not a coincidence. The fix is to distrust any service whose starting number is a secret. Mine isn't.

The portfolio has no live links

A portfolio of pretty screenshots with no clickable URLs is a portfolio of things that may not exist, may not be live, or may not have been built by the person showing them. A real operator links to real sites you can open, inspect, and — if you're thorough — check whether they still rank. Screenshots are a mood board. Live links are evidence. Ask for the second one.

"SEO included" — with nothing shipped

The phrase "SEO included" on a proposal, unaccompanied by any description of what that means monthly, is a red flag wearing a green costume. Ask what ships: content, page rewrites, rankings reviewed, indexing verified? If the answer is a plugin, a dashboard, or a shrug, "included" means someone typed the letters S-E-O and nothing more. That's a whole separate racket worth understanding on its own — the retainer that bills for the appearance of work.

The contract owns your domain

Buried in the agreement: the domain, or the hosting, or the "digital assets," registered to the agency for "management." This is the one that turns into a hostage situation later. Read the contract for who ends up owning the domain and the logins. If it's not unambiguously you, that's not a red flag, that's a stop sign.

The forms go somewhere nobody can name

When I ask a business owner where their contact form submissions land, the concerning answer isn't a wrong one — it's a blank one. "I think they email me?" A form whose delivery path nobody understands is a form that can fail invisibly, and invisible failure on the one page that captures leads is the most expensive thing on a small-business site.

Pressure disguised as scarcity

"This rate is only good this week." "I've got one slot left this month." Manufactured urgency exists to short-circuit the vetting you'd otherwise do. Real operators have a pipeline and can tell you when they'd start; they don't need to rush you past the questions. If the pitch is racing you toward a signature, slow down on principle.

The through-line under all six: a good web relationship survives scrutiny and a bad one is built to avoid it. Every red flag here is a way of keeping you from looking too closely — at the price, the work, the ownership, the plumbing. So look closely. That's the entire defense.

If you want the opposite of a pitch, request a website review. I'll look at what you've got and tell you what I see, red flags and all — it's an artifact you keep, not a sales call in disguise. Inquire about a project →