How to Hire Someone to Fix Your Website

You have decided the site needs a professional. Here is who the options are, what to gather before you ask for quotes, how to vet the person you pick, and the red flags that cost owners real money.

Common signs of this issue

• You have worked through the guides, tried the safe checks, and the site is still broken.
• The site brings in orders or enquiries, and every hour it stays down is costing you actual money.
• You don't control the hosting, domain, or admin logins — the person who did has moved on or gone quiet.
• The symptoms point at hacking: strange pages, redirects to other sites, browser warnings, or spam going out in your name.
• Every change you make seems to break something else, and you no longer trust yourself to touch it.
• You have already been burned once by a cheap fix that didn't hold, and this time you want it done properly.

Safe checks you can do yourself

None of these require sharing passwords with anyone.

• Start with the free option. If the whole site is down, slow, or showing server errors, contact your hosting company's support first. Server-side problems are their job and covered by what you already pay. They will not fix your site's own code or plugins, but they will tell you which side of the line the problem is on.
• Match the helper to the job. A freelancer suits most repairs — a broken page, a failed update, a hacked cleanup. An agency makes sense for a big rebuild or an ongoing relationship, at a higher price. If your site is on Wix, Shopify, or Squarespace, use the platform's own support first; much of what breaks there is theirs to fix.
• Write down the problem before you contact anyone: what exactly is broken, the precise error text if there is any, when it started, and what changed just before. Specific descriptions get specific quotes; vague ones get padded estimates.
• Confirm which logins you actually control — hosting, domain registrar, and the site's own admin. Missing access is the most common thing that turns a one-hour job into a multi-day one, and if you don't control them, recovering access may need to be step one of the job.
• Ask candidates about their experience with your exact situation, not websites in general. Someone who has cleaned twenty hacked WordPress sites is a different hire from someone who mostly builds new ones.
• Notice who asks questions before quoting. A good candidate wants the symptom, the start date, and what changed before naming a price. A price offered instantly, sight unseen, is a guess — and you will pay for the gap between the guess and reality.
• Ask them to explain their plan in plain English. If they can't describe what they think is wrong and what they intend to do about it in words you understand, communication will only get worse once your money is involved.
• Insist on a full backup before anyone changes anything. Any competent professional does this without being asked; asking the question is a cheap way to find out whether you are talking to one.

What this usually means

Hiring for a repair is a different job from hiring for a build, and it favors different people. Repairs reward diagnostic experience — someone who has seen your symptom fifty times and knows the three usual causes. That person is often an independent freelancer rather than an agency, because agencies price for project overhead you don't need on a one-fault fix. The exception: if the repair is really a rebuild of an old, unmaintained site, a solo generalist may be out of their depth — honest ones will say so.

The vetting that matters is mostly about behavior, not credentials. The good signs are consistent: they ask questions before quoting, they explain things in plain English, they insist on a backup before touching anything, they can point to references or past work like yours, and they put the scope in writing — what they will do, what it costs, and what happens if the same fault returns. None of that requires you to understand the technology; it only requires you to notice how they operate.

The red flags are just as consistent. Walk away from anyone who demands full server access before they have even described what they think is wrong; whose fixed price is wildly below everyone else's; who answers a repair request with a pitch to rebuild the whole site from scratch; who refuses to put scope in writing; who wants the entire payment upfront; or who wants your domain or hosting moved into an account they own. That last one is the most expensive mistake on this page — owners who let a helper hold the domain or hosting in their name can end up locked out of their own website when the relationship sours.

What not to do

• Don't hand out hosting or admin passwords to someone you haven't vetted, and never to a cold caller or a stranger who emailed claiming your site has problems.
• Don't let anyone move your domain or hosting into an account they own. Accounts stay in your name; helpers get their own separate login you can revoke.
• Don't pay the full amount upfront. A deposit or a small paid diagnosis is normal; the balance is for when the work is done and shown to you.
• Don't agree to a rebuild when you asked for a repair, at least not on the spot. Ask what specifically cannot be fixed and why, and get a second opinion if the answer is fuzzy.
• Don't choose purely on price. The cheapest quote on a repair is often a symptom patch that fails again next month, which makes it the most expensive quote after all.
• Don't skip written scope because the person seems nice. Friendly and vague is still vague, and vague is where disputes come from.

When to get help

A fair, low-risk way to start with anyone new is a small paid diagnosis: an hour or two of their time to identify the cause and quote the actual fix. It is a normal thing to ask for, good professionals like it, and it turns the big scary unknown into a small known cost. From there, judge them on the diagnosis itself — did they find a specific cause, explain it plainly, and quote a defined fix with a short guarantee if the same fault returns? If yes, let them do the work. If the diagnosis comes back as vague as the sales pitch, you have spent a little money to dodge a much bigger mistake, which is the diagnosis doing exactly its job.

Frequently asked questions

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