What Should I Ask Before Paying Anyone to Fix My Website?
Straight answers to what business owners actually ask about broken, hacked and invisible websites. Nothing gated, no sales call required.
Answers · nothing gated
What Should I Ask Anyone to Fix My Website?
Straight answers to what business owners actually ask about broken, hacked and invisible websites. Nothing gated, no sales call required.
Site down, hacked, or redirecting somewhere you didn’t choose? Stop reading and call (754) 302-4631.
The story
The most useful thing I’ve ever said to a prospective client cost me the job.
She asked whether she needed to move off WordPress, because two people had told her WordPress was insecure and she should be on something modern. I said no — that WordPress isn’t the insecure part, that the risk is overwhelmingly in third-party plugins nobody maintains, and that migrating platforms to solve a plugin-hygiene problem is an expensive way to take the same problem with you.
She thanked me, deleted four plugins, and never needed me again.
That’s the correct outcome, and it’s the entire premise of this section of the site. Most of what people are about to spend money on is answerable in a paragraph. The ones that aren’t are the ones worth hiring for.
How this section works
Three rules I’m holding myself to.
Every article here is titled with a question somebody actually asked me, and answers it in the first eighty words. Then it explains the reasoning, because an answer you can’t check is just a different person’s certainty.
Nothing is gated.
If an answer is worth having, it’s worth having without your email address. Lead magnets are how this industry converts curiosity into a sales sequence, and I’d rather convert it into you fixing your own problem.
Every answer names its limits.
This applies if X, and doesn’t if Y. The cases where a general answer stops working are exactly the cases worth paying someone for, and pretending otherwise is how people end up buying the wrong thing confidently.
Every statistic is attributed in the visible text, with a source and a year.
If a number can’t be sourced it gets cut. This site’s whole argument is that the other guys guess and I check — one unsourced figure undoes that in a sentence.
The four questions
The four questions worth asking anyone
If you read nothing else here, read these. They work on me and they work on the next three people you call.
What would you need to know before quoting this?
Tells you whether they diagnose or pattern-match. “Not much, we’ve done loads of these” is not the reassurance it sounds like.
What’s your best guess at what’s wrong — and how confident are you?
You want a number and a hedge. Anyone certain before looking has already decided what to sell you.
What would you do first, and why that first?
There should be an order and a reason for it. If the order happens to match whatever they’re best at, that’s your answer.
What’s a job like this that you got wrong?
Everyone competent has one. Someone with no answer either hasn’t done enough work or isn’t going to be straight with you about yours either.
When should you stop reading and hire someone? When the answers start disagreeing with each other about your specific situation, or when the cost of being wrong exceeds the cost of finding out properly. That’s the point the $997 Site Rescue exists for.
Are these written by AI? They’re written and edited by me; where AI tools are used in the process, it’s documented on the AI policy page rather than implied.
Start here
The longest answers on this site.
Articles are being published two a month. In the meantime, the two longest answers on this site are already written:
If you’ve found what you needed
Good. That was the point, and you don’t owe me anything for it.
If you’ve read three of these and the picture has got less clear rather than more, that’s usually a sign the problem isn’t the one you started with. That’s what the Site Rescue is for.
Site down, hacked, or redirecting somewhere you didn’t choose? Stop reading and call (754) 302-4631.