FOR ANYONE ALREADY PAYING SOMEONE
How to tell whether your web guy is actually doing anything
You pay someone every month and something happens, allegedly. Nobody ever teaches you how to check. Here are seven questions that get a straight answer out of anybody, and three things you can verify yourself in ten minutes without asking permission from anyone.
WHY THIS IS HARD
Website work is invisible when it is going well
Almost everything else you buy announces itself. The office gets cleaned and you can see the floor. The books get done and a return shows up. Website maintenance, when it is working perfectly, produces absolutely nothing you can see. The site simply keeps loading.
That makes it the easiest recurring invoice in the world to coast on, and the hardest one to challenge, because the honest answer to “what did you do last month?” genuinely is sometimes “not much, nothing needed doing.” The difference between a good provider and a bad one is not how busy they were. It is whether they can tell you what they looked at, what they decided, and why.
So do not ask whether they have been busy. Ask questions that have a checkable answer.
None of what follows is a gotcha. A provider doing real work will enjoy being asked, because these are the questions that finally let them show it.
SEVEN QUESTIONS
Ask these, then listen for specifics
“What did you change on my site last month?”
A good answer is a dated list, even a short one. A bad answer is a category — “maintenance and monitoring”, “security and optimisation”. Categories are what people reach for when there is no list.
“When did you last restore a backup and check that it opened?”
A good answer is a date. “We run daily backups” does not answer this question. A backup nobody has ever restored is a belief, not a backup, and you find out which one it is at the worst possible moment.
“Which plugins did you update, and did anything break?”
A good answer names a few and includes at least one thing that broke and got fixed. Nothing ever breaks only when nothing is ever updated, or when nobody is looking afterwards.
“What does Search Console say about my site right now?”
A good answer talks about pages indexed, pages excluded, and why. A bad answer is a score out of a hundred from a tool you have never heard of. Search Console is Google’s own opinion of your site, and it is free.
“What are my Core Web Vitals doing for real visitors?”
A good answer knows the difference between field data and lab data. A speed score for your homepage on a desktop connection is a lab number. What Google actually uses is what real visitors experienced over the last twenty-eight days.
“What did you decide not to do this month, and why?”
This is the one that separates them. Someone genuinely prioritising has a list of things they chose to skip and can defend it. Someone who never says no is not prioritising. They are filling hours.
“If I left tomorrow, what would I be taking with me?”
You should own the domain, the hosting account, the analytics property and the site itself. If any of that lives inside somebody else’s account and cannot be handed over, you are not a client, you are a hostage. Ask before you need the answer.
Seven questions, one email. If the replies are specific, you are in better shape than most people paying for this.
CHECK IT YOURSELF
Three things you can verify in ten minutes
None of these need anyone’s cooperation. Open your own website on your phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and count the seconds. Most owners have not looked at their own site on a phone in a year, and most sites are noticeably worse there than on the desk they were designed on.
Then send yourself a message through your own contact form. Form delivery breaks silently and constantly, usually after a plugin update or an email change, and almost nobody notices until they start wondering why the enquiries dried up.
Then open Search Console and look at the Pages report. If you do not have access to your own Search Console, that is itself an answer. If the count of pages that are not indexed has been climbing, something changed and nobody caught it.
And run the free check on this site. Two dozen technical, SEO and local-visibility signals plus Google’s real mobile speed scores, in about ten seconds. It will not tell you whether your provider is any good. It tells you what state your site is actually in, which is what you want in front of you before that conversation.
One last thing, and I mean it. Quite often the answer to all of this is that your provider is doing a reasonable job on a site that does not need much, and the right move is to leave them alone. The point is not to catch anyone out. It is to stop paying for a black box.
Next step: run the free website health check, or read what a care retainer actually covers if you are weighing up switching.
Further reading: Google on getting started with Search Console · how the Core Web Vitals thresholds were set.