Your Web Designer Probably Can't Code

Most marketing agencies don't build websites. They arrange them.

They open WordPress, install a theme someone else wrote, bolt on twenty plugins someone else wrote, drop in a page builder, and drag boxes around until it looks close enough to the mockup. Then they invoice you five grand and call it a website.

Or they don't even go that far. They sign you up to Wix or Squarespace, pick a template, swap the stock photos for yours, and charge you agency rates for an afternoon of dragging. You end up renting a site you can never move, on a platform you can never optimise, with a monthly bill that never stops.

That's not building. That's assembly. And when it breaks, and it will, nobody in that building knows why.

The tell-tale signs

You've probably already noticed some of these, even if you couldn't name what was wrong:

Your site is slow. Not "a bit slow on mobile" slow. Six seconds to first paint slow. That's a page builder loading four megabytes of CSS so a designer never had to learn a grid.

When something breaks, your web designer has to engage a third party or support person to fix it. Ask them who your host is, where your DNS sits, and who owns the domain registration. If the answer takes three days and involves them asking someone else, you don't own your web presence. They do, badly. Every small fix becomes a ticket, a delay, and a markup.

Your email sometimes goes to spam. Someone changed your nameservers and never carried over the SPF and DKIM records. This happens constantly. It costs businesses real money and it's caused entirely by not knowing what a TXT record is.

Everything is a plugin. Contact form? Plugin. Cookie banner? Plugin. Redirects? Plugin. SEO? Plugin, and a $200 a year subscription. Every one of those is a door left unlocked and a bit more weight on your load time.

The "SEO package" is a checklist. Green ticks in a dashboard don't rank you. Your title tags are auto-generated, your headings are in the wrong order because the theme wanted them that way, and your product pages have no structured data at all.

You can't get a straight answer about anything technical. Because there isn't one to give.

What twenty years actually looks like

I learned PHP from a book. A physical one, with a CD in the back sleeve. There was no Stack Overflow to paste an error into. You read the manual, you read the source, and you worked it out or you didn't ship.

Since then I've delivered hundreds of sites. Airbnb hosts and florists at one end. Multinationals and government departments at the other. The florist and the government department have more in common than you'd think: both need the thing to load fast, work on a cheap Android phone, not leak data, and keep working when nobody's looking at it.

That range matters because it means I've seen what breaks. I've migrated sites off hosts that went dark overnight. I've untangled DNS that four different agencies had all half-configured. I've inherited codebases with database credentials committed in plain text and a contact form emailing to an address nobody had checked since 2019.

None of that is exotic. It's normal. It's just invisible until it costs you.

The bit that actually matters to you

You didn't buy a website. You bought a salesperson who works nights and weekends and never calls in sick.

Judge it on that. Is it fast enough that people don't leave before it loads? Does it say the right thing in the first three seconds? Does the enquiry form actually land in an inbox someone reads? Can you find it when someone searches for what you sell? Does it look like a business worth trusting with money?

If you're not sure, that's the answer.

Most business owners can feel that something's off long before they can articulate it. Enquiries dried up. The site looks dated next to a competitor's. Something feels amateur about it and you can't put your finger on where. Usually you're right, and usually it's fixable without starting over.

What I do about it

Three things, depending on how bad it is.

Audit. I go through the whole thing. Speed, code quality, hosting, DNS, email deliverability, security, SEO fundamentals, accessibility, analytics. You get a plain English document telling you what's wrong, what it's costing you, what to fix first, and what to ignore. No jargon padding. If your site is fine, I'll tell you it's fine.

Tidy up. Most sites don't need replacing. They need the junk stripped out, the hosting sorted, the speed fixed, the forms verified, the content restructured so it converts. Often a fraction of a rebuild, and you keep whatever ranking you've earned.

Rebuild. Sometimes the foundation is rotten and patching it costs more than starting again. I'll say so, and I'll say why, and you'll get code you actually own, on hosting you actually control, that I'll hand over documented if you ever want to take it elsewhere.

No pitch

I'm not going to tell you your site is a disaster before I've looked at it. It might be perfectly good. Plenty are.

But if you've read this far, something already nagged at you. Send me the URL and I'll tell you straight what I find.