What To Prepare Before You Pay Anyone To Build Your Website

Most website projects that go badly do not go badly because the designer was bad. They go badly because the client was not ready, and nobody told them what ready looks like.

You pay a deposit, the designer asks for your content, and three weeks pass while you hunt for a logo file. The project stalls, the mood sours, and the site that eventually launches is built around placeholder text nobody ever replaced. That happens constantly, and it’s almost entirely avoidable.

Here is what to have in hand before you pay anybody a naira, including four things most checklists leave out and which cause the worst problems in Nigeria specifically.

Decide what the website is for, in one sentence

Not a list of nine goals. One sentence, with a job in it. Book more consultations. Sell the products we already sell on Instagram. Stop answering the same five WhatsApp questions every day.

Write it down before anyone shows you a design. A designer given a clear job builds toward it. A designer given no job builds something that looks nice, which is how people end up with a beautiful site that generates nothing.

Own your domain and your hosting yourself

This is the one that causes real damage, and almost no checklist mentions it.

Register your domain in your own name, with your own email, on your own account. Pay for hosting on an account you control. Then give your designer access as a user. Do not let them buy it for you and hold it.

When that goes wrong, it goes very wrong. A disagreement three years later and you find out that the domain your customers know, your email addresses, and every backlink you have ever earned all sit in someone else’s account. People pay serious money to get out of that, and some never do.

Ask two questions before you start. Whose name is the domain registered in. Which account holds the hosting. If the answer is not you, fix it first.

Get your content into one folder

Content is the single biggest cause of delay, every time. Before the project starts, put all of this in one shared folder.

Your logo as a high resolution file, ideally SVG or a PNG with a transparent background. Not a screenshot from your Instagram profile.

Real photos of your actual work, premises, products or team. Stock photos of people in suits who have never heard of your business fool nobody, and Nigerian customers are particularly good at spotting them.

Written text for every page, or at least an honest rough draft. Your services and what each one actually includes. Your prices, or your reason for not showing them.

Your real contact details, your address, your opening hours, and the phone number you will actually answer.

If writing the pages is the part you dread, say so up front and budget for it rather than letting it hold the project hostage. It’s normally the cheapest line item and the one with the most influence on whether the site sells. We handle that as content and copy work alongside the build for exactly this reason.

Write the page list yourself

Sketch the pages on one sheet of paper. Home, About, the individual services, Contact, and whatever else the job needs.

Give every service its own page rather than cramming six services onto one. That single decision does more for your search visibility than most things a designer will offer you, because a page about one thing can rank for that thing while a page about six ranks for nothing.

List the features, and separate them into now and later

Online payments. A booking calendar. A contact form that emails you properly. WhatsApp click to chat. A blog. Customer logins. An enquiry form that feeds your email list.

Then split the list in two. What must exist at launch, and what can wait. Feature creep is what turns a 4 week project into a 5 month one, and most of the creep gets added after the quote is agreed.

Agree the scope, the rounds and the money in writing

Get all of this on paper before the deposit.

Exactly which pages are included. How many rounds of revisions the price covers, and what happens after that. The payment milestones and what each one is tied to. The launch date, and what happens if content arrives late. Who owns the design files at the end.

None of this is about distrust. It’s about the two of you agreeing what finished means, so nobody argues about it in month three.

Ask what handover includes before you sign

Another one almost nobody thinks about until it’s too late. When the site launches, you should receive admin login for the website, access to the domain account, access to the hosting account, and a short recording or document showing you how to update the things you will need to update.

Ask what happens if you stop working together. If the answer is vague, that vagueness is the answer.

Decide who maintains it after launch

A website is not a building you hand over and forget. Plugins need updates, backups need checking, and the content needs to change as the business does.

Either you do it, or you pay someone to. Decide which before launch, because the sites that quietly break are always the ones where nobody agreed whose job it was.

Bring examples, and say what you dislike

Three sites you like, with a note on what you like about each. Three you dislike, same thing. Your existing brand colors if you have them.

Saying what you hate is more useful than saying what you love. It removes whole directions early, which saves revision rounds you have already paid for.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need all my content written before we start?

Not word perfect, but you do need real drafts. A site built on placeholder text almost always launches with some of it still in place.

How long should a small business website take?

Around 3 to 6 weeks when the content is ready. Content delays are the reason projects run long, far more often than design or development.

What if I already have a site and I am replacing it?

Keep the pages that already bring you traffic and make sure their addresses still work after launch. Rebuilds that ignore this lose rankings the business spent years earning.

Should I pay everything up front?

No. Tie payments to milestones. A deposit, a payment at design approval, and a final payment at launch is normal and fair to both sides.

Come to a build with these ten things ready and you will get a better site, faster, for less money, whoever you hire. If you would like to talk through your own list first, book a free consultation, or look at how we approach website projects and the work we have delivered for other businesses.