Ask who can change a price before you pay for the website
A website you cannot edit is a monthly bill with extra steps. Three questions, asked before you pay, decide whether you own what you bought.
In January a ferretería raises its prices. The owner writes to the person who built the website, waits, writes again, and three weeks later the site still shows last year's numbers. Customers arrive quoting a price that no longer exists, and the counter argues with them for free.
The site was not badly built. The arrangement was. What decides whether a website keeps working for you is not the design, it is who holds the keys and which parts you can change without asking permission.
The three questions
- Whose name is on the domain? It should be registered to you or your company, in an account whose email you control. The domain is your address; whoever holds it can take the site and your email with it.
- Whose account pays for the hosting? If it is inside somebody else's reseller account, you cannot move your site the day the relationship ends.
- Which parts can you change yourself, today, without calling anyone? Prices, opening hours, the WhatsApp number, a photo. Ask for a demonstration, not a promise.
Ask them in that order. A beautiful site on a domain you do not own is worth less than a plain one you control, because the first can be taken away in an afternoon and the second cannot.
What is fair to expect
Not everything needs to be editable. Building an admin screen for text that changes once a year costs more than it saves, and we will say so. The honest split is that the things that change with your business are yours to edit, and the rest is a small paid job when you need it.
- Prices, hours, phone numbers and photos: yours, with a screen simple enough that your cashier can use it.
- A written handover: domain registrar, hosting, and any account created in your name, with the passwords in your hands.
- A price for small changes agreed up front, so a two-line edit is a known cost and not a negotiation.
- A copy of the site you can download, so moving to another developer is a transfer and not a rebuild.
If the person who built your site stopped answering tomorrow, could you still change a price? That single question is the whole test.
When none of this matters
If your prices genuinely never move and the site is four pages that say who you are and where you are, a fixed site with no editing screen is the right, cheap answer. The trap is not simplicity. The trap is paying every month for something nobody in your business is able to change.
The three questions cost nothing to ask and they are hard to ask later. Ask them while the quote is still on the table, and write the answers into whatever you sign.