Hiring a Web Designer? Ask These 9 Questions First

A pest control owner in Tucson hires a web designer for $4,500. The site looks sharp — professional photos, clean layout, modern fonts. Three months later, the phone isn’t ringing. He runs our audit and scores 18 out of 100. No contact form. No clickable phone number. No service area pages. No schema markup. The site looks great. It just doesn’t work.

This happens constantly. We’ve audited 1,537 pest control websites across 12 states, and the average score is 21 out of 100. Many of these sites were professionally designed. The problem isn’t aesthetics — it’s that most web designers don’t understand what a pest control website actually needs to generate leads. They build brochures when they should be building conversion machines.

Before you write a check, here are nine questions to ask any designer or agency. The answers will tell you whether they’ll build a site that scores well — or one that joins the 61% sitting below 20.

Question 1: Will you include a contact form on every page?

25% of pest control websites — 381 companies — have no contact form at all. Not on the homepage, not on service pages, not anywhere. That’s a quarter of the industry where visitors can’t submit their information online. If your designer doesn’t plan to include a form on every major page, that’s a disqualifier.

The form should be short: name, phone, pest type, zip code. It should appear on the homepage, every service page, every city page, and the blog. Visitors don’t always enter through your homepage — they land on whatever page Google shows them. If that page has no form, you’ve lost the lead.

Ask the designer specifically: “Will there be a contact form or quote request form on every page of the site?” If the answer is “we’ll put it on the contact page,” that’s not good enough. The highest-scoring sites in our audit have forms on every page.

Question 2: Will phone numbers be clickable on mobile?

20% of pest control websites — 297 sites — have phone numbers that aren’t tappable on mobile. The number displays as plain text. A visitor on their phone can see it but can’t tap it to call. They’d have to memorize the number, switch to their dialer, and type it in. For emergency pest issues — a rat in the kitchen, a wasp nest by the front door — nobody is going to do that.

Making a phone number clickable requires a tel: link in the HTML. It’s one line of code. Any competent web developer knows this. But one in five pest control sites still get it wrong.

Ask: “Will the phone number in the header be a clickable tel: link on mobile?” If the designer doesn’t immediately say yes and seem confused by the question, they’ve probably built sites before without this basic feature.

Question 3: Will you build individual service pages for each pest type?

A pest control company that lists “ants, roaches, termites, rodents, and mosquitoes” on a single services page is competing for none of those keywords individually. Google ranks pages, not websites. If you want to show up for “termite treatment [city],” you need a page dedicated to termite treatment.

23% of pest control sites — 350 companies — don’t even have a dedicated rodent page. Across the industry, sites that have individual pages for termites, ants, roaches, rodents, mosquitoes, bed bugs, and wildlife consistently score higher than those that lump everything together.

Ask: “Will you create a separate page for each pest type we treat?” A good designer will build out 6–10 individual service pages. A bad one will create a single “Our Services” page with a bulleted list. The difference in search visibility is enormous.

Schema markup, pricing pages, and commercial service pages are the most commonly missed elements — designers rarely include them unprompted.

Question 4: Will you add a pricing page with service ranges?

35% of pest control sites — 535 companies — show no pricing whatsoever. This is the most common gap in our entire dataset. And it’s almost always a design decision, not a business one. The designer never asked about pricing, and the owner never thought to mention it.

You don’t need exact prices. Ranges work fine: “General pest treatment: $99–$199 per visit.” “Quarterly plans starting at $35/month.” “Termite inspection: free with treatment.” These ranges set expectations, pre-qualify leads, and reduce tire-kicker calls. They also give Google content to match against pricing-related searches.

Ask: “Will you build a dedicated pricing page?” If the designer says “most businesses don’t want to show prices,” push back. The data says otherwise — sites with pricing consistently outperform those without it in our scoring.

Question 5: Will you install schema markup?

27% of pest control websites — 403 companies — have no schema markup. Schema is structured data that tells Google what your business is, where it operates, and what services it offers. Without it, Google has to parse your site content and guess. With it, you’re eligible for rich results, knowledge panels, and enhanced local listings.

Most designers don’t install schema because it’s not visible to the human eye. It’s code in the page header that only search engines read. But it’s one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost SEO additions you can make. A LocalBusiness schema with your NAP information, service area, hours, and service types takes 30 minutes to implement and permanently improves your search eligibility.

Ask: “Will you implement LocalBusiness schema markup with our service area and service types?” If the designer doesn’t know what schema is, that’s a red flag. If they know but plan to skip it, that’s worse.

Question 6: Will you create service area pages for every city we serve?

22% of pest control sites — 327 companies — have no service area pages. These are individual pages targeting “[service] in [city]” keywords — the exact phrases homeowners type when they need pest control.

A pest control company serving 15 cities needs 15 city-specific pages, each with unique content about local pest challenges, service offerings, and a conversion form. Cookie-cutter pages with only the city name swapped don’t work — Google can detect thin, duplicated content and won’t rank it.

Ask: “Will you build unique service area pages for each city in our territory?” The designer should plan for at least 10–20 pages depending on your service radius. If they propose a single “Areas We Serve” page with a list of city names, that’s a missed opportunity for significant organic traffic.

Question 7: Will you set up analytics and conversion tracking?

21% of pest control sites — 319 companies — have no analytics installed. They don’t know how many visitors they get, where those visitors come from, or whether the website generates any leads at all. The designer built the site and walked away without any measurement in place.

Analytics setup should be part of every website build. At minimum: Google Analytics 4 with event tracking for form submissions and phone clicks. Ideally, also Google Search Console for monitoring search performance and a call tracking number for attributing phone leads to the website.

Ask: “Will you install Google Analytics 4 and set up conversion tracking for forms and phone clicks?” This should be standard. If it’s listed as an add-on or isn’t mentioned, the designer is building a site you can’t measure — and you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Question 8: Will the site have HTTPS and proper meta tags?

19% of pest control sites — 286 companies — still don’t have HTTPS. That’s a security protocol that’s been standard since 2018. Google explicitly penalizes non-HTTPS sites in rankings. Browsers show “Not Secure” warnings to visitors. There’s no legitimate reason for any new website to launch without it.

Similarly, 20% of sites — 306 companies — are missing meta descriptions on their pages. Meta descriptions don’t directly affect rankings, but they determine what shows up in search results beneath your page title. A missing meta description means Google auto-generates one from random page content, which often looks terrible and reduces click-through rates.

Ask: “Will the site launch with HTTPS and custom meta descriptions on every page?” Both of these are bare minimum requirements. If a designer can’t confirm them, find someone else.

Question 9: Will you include a commercial services page?

27% of pest control sites — 409 companies — have no page targeting commercial clients. Restaurants, hotels, property management companies, and warehouses all need pest control. These contracts are high-value — $500 to $5,000+ per month for recurring service. But without a dedicated commercial page, you’re invisible to these clients when they search.

A commercial services page should highlight compliance expertise (health codes, FDA, USDA), industry-specific experience (restaurants, hospitality, multi-family), and recurring service plans. It should also have its own CTA — commercial clients don’t want to fill out the same form as a homeowner with an ant problem.

Ask: “Will you build a separate page targeting commercial pest control clients?” If the designer groups commercial and residential together, they don’t understand the pest control business well enough to build an effective site.

Red flags that predict a low-scoring site

Beyond these nine questions, watch for these warning signs during the hiring process:

“We’ll use a template and customize it.” Templates aren’t automatically bad, but they become a problem when the designer doesn’t add pest-control-specific elements. A generic small business template without service pages, pricing, schema, or city pages will score poorly no matter how good it looks.

“We don’t do SEO — that’s a separate service.” If the designer builds the site without on-page SEO foundations, you’ll pay a second company to retrofit everything. SEO should be baked into the build: page titles, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, schema, image alt text, and URL structure.

“You can add the content later.” Content is the site. A pest control website without pest-specific service pages, pricing information, and local content is a shell. If the designer expects you to write and add all the content yourself, the site will launch half-built and stay that way.

“We’ve built lots of small business websites.” Generic experience isn’t pest control experience. Ask to see examples of home service or pest control sites specifically. Check whether those examples have the elements we’ve discussed — forms, clickable phones, service pages, pricing, schema. If they don’t, the designer will repeat the same mistakes on your site.

How to evaluate the finished product

After the site launches, run it through our audit. The scoring criteria covers all the elements discussed here: conversion paths, trust signals, content depth, technical health, and local SEO. A well-built pest control site should score at least 50 on the first audit. If it scores below 30, the designer missed critical elements.

The average across our 1,537-site dataset is 21 out of 100. If your new site beats that average, you’re already ahead of most competitors. But don’t settle for average — the companies that dominate their local markets score 60+, and they got there by demanding these specific elements from whoever built their site.