Domain, hosting and access - in your name
- The domain is registered to you or your company, not to the contractor
- You have access to the hosting, the code repository, the admin panel and analytics
- You receive the source code and know which stack it is built on
If this is not agreed up front, changing contractors turns into a negotiation over access.
Mobile and speed
Many visitors will open the site on a phone, so the mobile version gets checked first, not last. You can test speed for free in PageSpeed Insights.
Google considers these values good: the main content loads within 2.5 seconds (LCP), the response to an interaction takes no more than 200 ms (INP), and layout shift during loading stays at or below 0.1 (CLS).
SEO is built in during development
- A unique title and description on every page
- Clear, readable page URLs
- A separate page for each service, not one page about everything
- sitemap.xml and robots.txt
- schema.org markup: organization, services, breadcrumbs
- The site is verified in Google Search Console and, for Yandex search, in Yandex Webmaster
This is not promotion yet - it is the foundation without which there is nothing to promote.
Inquiries and analytics
- Where inquiries go - email, Telegram, WhatsApp or a CRM - and who has tested this on the live site
- Messenger buttons, if your customers would rather write to you there than fill in a form
- Analytics and goals: an inquiry, a call, a click through to WhatsApp
- What a visitor sees if the form fails to send
Languages
A company in Kazakhstan should decide at the outset whether it needs Kazakh and English versions. A language can be added later, but it is cheaper to build the structure in from day one: separate URLs, hreflang, fonts with Kazakh letters.
Content
- Who writes the copy and provides the photos
- Whether you will be able to update prices, news and products yourself - and whether you need an admin panel
- A personal data policy, if the site collects contact details
Security and backups
- An HTTPS certificate with automatic renewal
- Database and file backups: how often they run and where they are stored
- Who updates dependencies and watches for vulnerabilities
Details people rarely ask about
- One primary site address: with or without www, and http always redirects to https
- Pages that do not exist return a 404 status code, and when you move from an old site, redirects are set up from the old URLs
- Images in modern formats (WebP, AVIF) and sized for a phone screen
- Link previews in WhatsApp and Telegram: an image, a title and a description
- An icon for the browser tab and for the phone's home screen
We learned about messenger previews on our own site: Telegram showed the link card, but WhatsApp did not. The cause was the image size - WhatsApp does not show a preview if the image is larger than roughly 300 KB or loads too slowly. Once we switched the preview to a compressed JPEG, the card appeared.
Stages and sign-off
It helps to split the work into stages, each with a clear result: structure and prototype, design, development, launch. You approve each stage and review a work-in-progress version via a link. That way a misunderstanding of the brief surfaces at the prototype stage, when it is cheap to fix, rather than after launch.
Agree in advance what counts as the end of a stage, how many rounds of revisions it includes and who checks the site on a phone, a tablet and a computer before sign-off.
After launch
Clarify what support covers - bug fixes, small edits, updates, monitoring - and how further development is billed. A good sign is a contractor who shows you work-in-progress versions via a link before launch, not just the final result.
Questions to ask a contractor
- Show me live sites you have built, not mockups
- Whose name will the domain and hosting be registered in?
- Will I get the source code and access?
- What does SEO during development include?
- How will I be able to change the site's content?
- What does support after launch include?
