How to Hire a Web Developer in London: 10 Questions That Separate Pros From Pretenders

The 10 questions to ask

• 1. "Can I see something you shipped that is still live?" — live products age; screenshots don't. Ask to click around a real deployment.
• 2. "Who writes the code — you, or someone you outsource to?" — in London's freelance market, quiet subcontracting is common. You want the person you interview on the keyboard.
• 3. "How will you handle design?" — a developer who designs properly (or works from a real design system) saves you hiring a second person and losing details in the hand-off.
• 4. "What happens if Google can't rank the site?" — listen for concrete answers: server-side rendering, Core Web Vitals, structured data, semantic HTML. Vague nods here cost you traffic later.
• 5. "How do you test before launch?" — even a lightweight answer (staging environment, device pass, error monitoring) beats 'I check it in my browser'.
• 6. "Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting?" — the answer must be you, in accounts registered to you, from day one.
• 7. "What does week one look like?" — pros describe a thin working slice deployed early; amateurs describe two weeks of setup.
• 8. "What's your communication rhythm?" — you want a fixed cadence (short async updates, a weekly call), not 'message me anytime' silence.
• 9. "What will this cost to run per month?" — hosting, domains, email, APIs. A professional knows the running costs of their own stack.
• 10. "What would you cut if the budget halved?" — the quality of this answer tells you whether they think in product terms or just in tasks.

Red flags that predict a bad project

• A quote produced instantly, with no questions asked about your business.
• No live work — only mock-ups, 'client confidentiality', or template marketplaces.
• Everything is 'easy' — engineers who never say 'that part is hard' haven't built much.
• They want to host everything in their own accounts — that's a hostage situation waiting to happen.
• WordPress-by-default for a product that clearly needs custom engineering (or the reverse: overkill engineering for a five-page brochure).

What a professional process looks like

Expect a short discovery call, a written scope with milestones, a deployed preview URL within the first week or two, and demos of real software throughout — not slide decks. Payment tied to milestones. A handover that includes the repository, environment variables, a README, and a walkthrough call. If a London developer offers you that process, rate becomes a secondary question: predictability is what you are buying.

Hire the developer whose questions make your own brief better. That instinct is the same one that will catch problems in your product before your users do.