What Should I Ask Before Paying Anyone to Fix My Website?

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.

Here’s the direct answer

Before paying anyone to fix your website, ask four things: what they’d need to know before quoting, what they think is actually wrong and how confident they are, what they’d do first and why that first, and what a job like yours they got wrong. Anyone certain of the diagnosis before looking is selling you the service they already wanted to sell. sosSTEVIE publishes these answers openly because the questions filter better than any pitch.

Key Takeaways

Most website questions have a real answer, and it’s usually shorter and cheaper than the thing you were about to buy.
Certainty before diagnosis is the warning sign. Every specialist diagnoses you with a condition they happen to treat.
Nothing here is gated. No email required, no PDF, no book a call to find out.
Every answer says what it doesn’t cover, because the limits of an answer are usually where your actual problem lives.

How this section works

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.

Three rules I’m holding myself to:

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 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

Start here

Articles are being published two a month. In the meantime, the two longest answers on this site are already written:

Can a website be hacked without looking hacked? — what happened to mine, and six checks you can run this afternoon
How fast can a hacked website actually be caught and contained? — one case, with the real numbers
Is it safe to put client information into ChatGPT? — and what an AI policy should actually say

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to give you my email to read these? No. Nothing on this page or in any article here is gated, and there’s no download that unlocks after a form. Gated answers exist to start a sales sequence, and the sequence is worth less to me than you actually solving your problem — a lot of this business arrives by referral from people who never hired me.

How do I know these answers aren’t just marketing for your services? You don’t, and you shouldn’t take my word for it. What you can do is check them: every statistic is attributed to a named source and a year in the visible text, and every article states the conditions under which its answer stops applying. If any answer here can’t survive you going and looking it up, that’s a fault worth telling me about.

Are these written by AI? They’re written by me and edited by me, and where AI tools are used in the process it’s documented on the AI policy page rather than implied. Publishing a policy and then quietly generating the content it covers would be a strange way to run a business whose product is telling clients the truth about their websites.

What if my question isn’t answered here? Send it. The backlog for this section comes almost entirely from questions people have actually asked, and an unanswered one is more useful to me than a compliment. Call (754) 302-4631 or use the contact page. You’ll get an answer whether or not there’s a job in it.

When should I stop reading and just 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. A site that’s losing enquiries every month is usually past that line already — the $997 Diagnostic exists precisely because that’s the point where general answers stop being enough.

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 Diagnostic is for.

Start with the SOS Digital Diagnostic — $997 →

Site down, hacked, or redirecting somewhere you didn’t choose? Stop reading and call (754) 302-4631.