Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Squarespace Designer
Squarespace specific questions only. Each one is answerable in a sentence by somebody who works on the platform properly and awkward for somebody who has watched a tutorial, which is what makes the list useful.
Why This Needs Its Own List
The general questions still matter. References, stability, how they work, what the contract says. Those apply to any supplier and are covered in our guides on choosing an agency rather than here.
What makes this platform different is that most technical decisions have already been made by Squarespace. Nobody is choosing a framework, configuring a server or selecting hosting.
Which means questions about build capability tell you very little. Almost anybody can produce a Squarespace site that functions, so asking whether somebody can build one is a question with only one answer.
What separates suppliers here is different. Who owns the site. Whether you can edit it. Whether the structure was decided or inherited. Who writes the content. And what happens once it is live.
The test applied to every question below. Somebody who works on this platform regularly answers in a sentence, without hedging, usually adding something you did not ask for. Somebody who has learned it from a tutorial gives a general answer about it depending on the project.
Who Will Own The Account
Will the site sit on my Squarespace account rather than yours? Ask it first, because it is the question buyers forget and the one with the largest consequences.
Why it matters. If the site is on their account, you are renting rather than owning. You may not be able to take it with you, appoint a different designer, else keep trading if they stop.
What a good answer sounds like. Yours, from the beginning, with us added as a contributor. One sentence, offered without hesitation.
What to follow up on. Whose name is the domain registered in, since a site you own on a domain you do not is half the problem solved. And what happens if we part company, asked in those words.
What should concern you. An answer describing how they manage everything without addressing ownership. Or an undertaking to transfer it at the end, which is a promise rather than an arrangement. Promises weaken once a relationship sours.
None of this makes a supplier hosting under their own account untrustworthy. Some run that arrangement deliberately and explain it. The problem is discovering it later, which one question at the outset prevents.
Will I Be Able To Edit It Myself
Ask what you will be able to change without them after handover. Then refuse to accept full control as an answer, because everybody says it and it means nothing.
Name six things and get a yes or no on each. Editing the text inside a section. Swapping an image. Adding a page. Reordering sections on a page. Changing an item in the menu. Publishing a blog post.
Somebody who knows how they build answers all six immediately. Hesitation means the approach is undecided, so it will be decided by whatever is quickest during the build.
Then ask whether they will show you. Training is a real deliverable, it takes an hour, yet it is left out of a remarkable number of projects.
Why this matters more here. On a self managed platform there are genuine technical reasons an owner cannot safely change things. On Squarespace there are very few.
So a designer who leaves you unable to edit your own site has usually chosen that outcome, whether deliberately or by building in a way that was faster for them. A supplier who is necessary for every change is selling a dependency rather than a website. On this platform it is a dependency with no technical justification.
How Will The Structure Be Decided
When do we decide which pages exist and how somebody moves between them? This is the question that separates suppliers on this platform more cleanly than any other.
What a good answer sounds like. Before any styling begins, as a distinct step, with you in the room. Somebody who works this way will describe it as a session or a document rather than as something that happens.
What a poor answer sounds like. As we go along. Or that they will follow the template's structure, which is a demonstration built for a different business.
Why this is the decisive question. Because on Squarespace construction is close to free, as set out in what a Squarespace designer is. If the structure is improvised, you are paying for styling alone.
That is the cheaper half of the work presented as the whole job. It is invisible in the finished site, since nobody looking at a page can tell whether its position was chosen or inherited.
The follow up worth asking. What informs it? Listen for what your customers ask before buying, which services you want more of, plus where enquiries currently come from. Listen out for what the template does, which is not an answer to the question.
Who Is Writing The Content
Who writes the words, plus who supplies the photographs? This is the largest source of delay and unexpected cost on Squarespace projects. It is entirely preventable.
Three answers, all acceptable. You write it. They write it, at a stated cost. Somebody else writes it.
One answer that is not. Unassigned, which is the default outcome when nobody raises it.
What happens when it is unassigned. One of three things, none good. The project stops with a finished design and no words in it. It launches thin, with gaps staying for years because urgency disappears the moment a site goes live. Or the designer writes it halfway through, at a price negotiated when you have least room to negotiate.
The follow up if the answer is you. By when, then what happens if that date passes? A supplier who has run projects before will have an answer, since they have watched this happen.
Get it into the proposal rather than a conversation. A line stating who supplies copy, who supplies photographs and by what date costs nothing to write and prevents the commonest way these projects go wrong.
Will You Use Custom Code
Does this build need custom code? If so, for what purpose? A specific answer is reassuring. Reaching for code as a default is not.
It affects your plan. Per Squarespace's documentation in 2026, custom CSS is available across billing plans while code injection sits on Core and above. So if the build involves scripts, your plan tier stops being an administrative choice and becomes part of the specification, with a permanent monthly cost attached.
It has to be maintained. The platform changes, so code written against how it behaved two years ago can stop working. It usually fails quietly, while the page continues to look broadly correct.
It creates a dependency. Somebody has to fix it, meaning whoever wrote it or somebody else learning code they did not write.
The two follow ups. Who maintains this? And what happens to it when the platform changes?
The answer that should reassure you most is a supplier saying most of what you have described is available through the platform's own controls, which cover more than buyers expect. How to tell the difference is in how Squarespace templates work.
How Many Rounds Of Changes
Two halves to this question. Asking only the first is why it causes so many arguments. How many rounds are included, plus what counts as a round?
Why the second half matters. Two rounds means nothing alone. To a client a round is usually a stage of the project. To a supplier it is a batch of feedback. Both readings are reasonable, which is why the dispute happens and why neither feels unreasonable during it.
What a good answer contains. A number, a definition of what a round is, plus what happens if you need more.
The arrangement that protects both sides. Agree that feedback is collected and sent once per round rather than arriving as individual messages over a fortnight.
That sounds like a constraint on you and mostly is not. Consolidated feedback produces better results, since looking at everything at once reveals which changes conflict. Scattered feedback produces a site adjusted twelve times in twelve directions.
It also removes the argument, since both parties can count. Nobody is left claiming an email was a comment rather than a round.
What Happens After Launch
Five questions, asked when buyers have usually stopped concentrating.
What support is included, in weeks. Not described as being there if you need us.
What it costs afterwards. Established before you need it rather than after.
Who is reachable when the contact form stops working on a Saturday. By name, by what route, within what time.
Will somebody here be trained. Block three, in a different form.
Who makes changes afterwards, at what rate.
Then the question specific to this platform. It is worth asking directly, because it catches something.
What does your maintenance charge actually cover?
On a self managed platform maintenance is real work: updates, security, backups, repairs. On Squarespace the platform does all of that as part of your subscription. So a supplier quoting a monthly maintenance fee here should be able to say what it buys. The legitimate answers are content changes, support and small pieces of work rather than upkeep. A charge for maintaining something the subscription already maintains is worth questioning politely before it becomes permanent.
Have You Worked With Businesses Like Mine
Ask it, though not for the reason people usually ask it. You are not checking whether they have built a site for another plumber. You are listening for what they think a website is for.
What a good answer sounds like. They start asking you questions. What do clients ask before they commit? Where do enquiries come from at the moment? Which service would you like more of? Which jobs are worth the most?
Somebody who thinks about service businesses cannot help doing this, since those answers are what they need to decide what the site should say.
What a poor answer sounds like. A conversation about look and feel, colour preferences, plus what competitors' sites look like. All reasonable subjects, none of which reveals anything about whether the site will produce work.
The distinction worth holding. Both kinds will produce something attractive, which on this platform is close to guaranteed. Only one is thinking about whether a stranger arriving becomes an enquiry.
So trade experience matters less than orientation. Somebody who has never worked in your industry yet asks what your customers worry about will serve you better than somebody with five sites in your sector who wants to discuss colours.
And One For Yourself
Do you need to hire anybody at all?
It sits at the end because you can only answer it having read the rest. Having seen the questions, you can judge whether the answers matter for your situation.
You may not need anybody if your offer is simple, you need a small number of pages, you have photographs you are pleased with, plus some time and reasonable taste. The platform exists so that people can do this. It does that job well.
You probably do if the site is the main way people find and contact you, if you have no time and it will otherwise sit half finished for a year, else if you have already built one and it produces nothing.
That last case is the most common reason anybody engages us. It is worth noticing what it usually is not. It is rarely a site that looks bad. It is a site that looks perfectly fine and does nothing, which is a structure problem wearing a design problem's clothes.
The full working through, including a method for deciding whether paying is worth it using your own numbers, is in DIY Squarespace against hiring a Squarespace designer.
If the answer is not yet, that is a good outcome. The money goes further on photography and written content than on design for a business at that stage.
Ask us all nine.
Please.
This list was written to be used on anybody, including us. The account goes in your name, the structure is agreed before anything is styled, then we tell you which five things you can change yourself before you ask.
What a Squarespace project covers:
Ongoing management afterwards sits inside our fixed monthly fee. Project work is quoted per site.
Fourteen guides.
One platform.
This page covers hiring. The rest of the series covers the role, cost, timescales, templates, what good design looks like, designing for enquiries, service businesses and the platform comparisons.
