web design
Has Your UK Web Developer Overcharged You?
How to tell if you paid too much for your website — and what you should actually have received for your money.
Most UK businesses do not know whether their website was worth what they paid for it. They paid a developer, received a site that looked acceptable at launch, and then moved on. Whether it was good value only becomes apparent later — usually when they notice it doesn’t rank for anything useful, or when a competitor with a better site starts winning the work.
This guide gives you a framework for evaluating what you got, and what you should have received.
What a professionally built UK business website should include
Regardless of what you paid — £800 or £8,000 — there are things that should be present on every professional website:
Schema markup Your website should have structured data telling Google exactly what your business is, where it is, what it does, and how to contact you. This is not visible to website visitors. It exists for machines — search engines and AI systems that need to understand your business without reading your pages like a human.
A site without schema markup is structurally disadvantaged. Not having it is the equivalent of not being listed in the right category in a directory.
Proper page titles and meta descriptions Every page should have a descriptive, keyword-relevant title — not just the company name repeated on every page. If your homepage title is literally just your company name, that is a significant problem.
A heading hierarchy Pages should have one H1 that describes the page clearly, followed by H2s and H3s that structure the content logically. A page that is entirely paragraph text, or one that uses headings purely for visual effect with no semantic logic, is invisible to Google’s crawlers.
Fast page loading Pages should load quickly on mobile connections. The UK has very good broadband by global standards, but mobile data speeds vary, and Google measures mobile performance as part of its ranking signals. A site built on a heavy page builder, loaded with scripts, and hosted on a slow server will perform poorly on Core Web Vitals.
A clear conversion path Every page should end with an obvious next step — a phone number, a contact form, a booking link. Visitors who reach a dead end leave.
A way to make updates A website that cannot be updated is a liability. If you need to email your developer every time you want to change your prices, add a team member, or post a project update, that is a problem with the delivery, not a normal cost of having a website.
Signs you may have been overcharged (or underserved)
Your site ranks for nothing except your company name
If you google your core service + your town and your site does not appear in the first three pages, your site has an SEO problem. This is almost always a structural issue — missing schema, no local signals, thin content — that could have been built correctly from the start.
There is no schema markup
Open your website’s source code (right-click → View Source) and search for application/ld+json. If you find nothing, your site has no schema markup. If you paid a developer several thousand pounds and there is no schema, you did not receive a complete build.
Page titles are just the company name
Visit your site and look at the browser tab. If every page shows just your company name, the page titles have not been configured. This is a basic SEO failure.
It’s slow on mobile
Visit your site on your phone on mobile data (not Wi-Fi). If it feels slow, run it through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. A Core Web Vitals score in the red or orange means the build has performance problems that were either ignored or never measured.
You cannot update it without a developer
If changing your phone number requires emailing someone, your site was not delivered with maintainability in mind. Modern websites should be manageable without technical knowledge.
What to do if you’ve identified problems
The first step is to understand exactly what is wrong. True View Solutions runs a free audit — we look at your structure, your schema, your page titles, your speed, and your local SEO signals, and send you a plain-English report.
If the problems are fixable with tweaks, we will tell you that. If the site needs rebuilding to do its job properly, we will tell you that too — and we will show you what the improved version looks like before you commit to anything.
We build before we bill. You see the work first.
Get a free audit of your current site — request it here.