There is no license for web developers. No exam, no board, no certification anyone has to hold before taking your money. I wrote about that in Why Web Development Has No Standards. This post is the practical side of it: how to check someone before you hire them.
Every example below is something I found in the field.
Rankings And Badges Are Not Vetting
Directories and award badges look like someone already did the checking for you.
Often nobody did.
I looked at the top freelancer listed for web design on one of the largest agency review directories. That person's own website had not been updated since 2021. The reviews on the profile described work done by a different company entirely.
It was still the first result.
I also looked at a local agency displaying a Top Web Development Company badge. The directory behind that badge lets agencies submit themselves and verifies them largely against their own website and testimonials. The agency's "Recent Work" section showed businesses that do not exist, filled with placeholder text in a fake language. One of its listed clients had a live website with a 2013 copyright from a different designer, eleven years before the agency opened.
A badge tells you someone applied for a badge.
It does not tell you anyone checked the work.
Check Their Own Website First
A developer's own site is the one site they had every reason to get right.
A website "expert" once told a freight carrier their site was fine. His own site was missing a meta description on every page, had a bad canonical tag on the homepage, and misspelled the word received on its thank you page.
A designer cold-pitched one of my clients through their contact form, offering to improve their website. Her own homepage had no meta description, no schema, and twenty five images without alt text.
If they skipped it on their own site, they will skip it on yours.
Ask For Live Client Sites, Then Look At Them
A portfolio is a list of claims. Visit the sites. Scroll to the footer and see who built it and when. Copy a sentence from the site and search for it in Google. If nothing comes up, either the site is not indexed or the business is not real.
Ask Who Owns The Domain, The Hosting, And The Google Profile
The answer you want is you. The domain should be registered in your name, and you should have owner access to your Google Business Profile.
If the developer holds those, you are depending on that person staying reachable forever. When they stop answering, that is a Ghost Developer, and I hear some version of that story constantly.
Ask What Happens When Something Breaks
Listen for specifics. Who monitors the site, how fast a problem gets addressed, and who calls whom.
One auto shop paid a vendor one hundred dollars a month to manage its website. The domain lapsed anyway, and a Chinese manufacturing company ended up with it. "I'm always available" commits to nothing. A real process is something you can check.
Ask For Their Standards
A developer with standards can tell you what they are. Ask for them in writing. Mine are published on my Standards page, but a page is not required.
An answer is.
If they cannot state their standards, they do not have any.
Five Minute Checks Anyone Can Run
Run our tools here: Domain Checker and Domain Crawler
Or, you can look for yourself. Right click the homepage, choose View Page Source, and search for "noindex." If it appears on the homepage, the site is hidden from Google.
In that same source, search for "description." If there is no meta description, Google writes its own.
Open the site on your phone and read every page.
Check the copyright year in the footer.
Look for a privacy policy.
Submit a test message through the contact form and see whether anyone answers.
The Foundation Connection
Hiring the developer is the first decision in building a Digital Foundation, and it shapes every decision after it. You do not need to read code to make that decision well.
You do not need to know how to build a website to check whether someone else does.
You only need to look.
Further Reading
Why Web Development Has No Standards
In The Field 013: Website Is Functional, All Good | The Good Enough Delusion
In The Field 015: The Pitch And The Proof | Those in Glass Houses
In The Field 016: Where Did My Developer Go? | The Ghost Developer
In The Field 012: Someone Was Supposed To Be Watching | The Indifference Hosting Problem
In The Field 019: The $5,000 Design Studio With One Client And No Website
