Ownership: who holds the keys
1. Who owns the domain, the hosting and the code, and in whose name are they billed.
The answer should be you, from day one. The domain is registered to you. Hosting is on your card and your login. The code is in a repository you own from the first commit.
On my last build the client opened the hosting account himself, in his own name, before any work started. He is not tied to one developer, including me.
The redirect map and the baseline
2. How will you build the redirect map.
The wrong answer is from your sitemap. The sitemap is a file the old CMS wrote and it is often incomplete. The right answer starts with asking the old server one URL at a time to find what it serves. Then it adds the Search Console URL export, the analytics landing pages, a full crawl and the internal link graph. On my last build the server served 19 URLs and the sitemap listed 12. All 19 redirect in one hop.
3. Will you take a baseline before anything changes.
A 90-day organic export from your own Search Console, taken while the old site is still up, with a snapshot of every title, H1, canonical and schema. Without it, nobody can say afterwards whether the rebuild worked.
Launch day and the week after
4. What happens to my email while DNS moves.
Email lives on DNS records that sit next to the ones being changed. The answer you want names the mail records, says they will be copied before the change, and says email was uninterrupted on their last cutover. Mine was.
5. Can I edit it without breaking it.
Ask to be shown, on staging, how to change a paragraph, add a page and swap an image. If the answer is to send the changes to the developer, ask what that costs per change and how long it takes.
The edges of the job
6. What is not included.
Every honest quote has a list. Mine names the page count, the number of old pages redirected, whether a compliance review is included, and that hosting is billed to you directly. A quote with nothing excluded has priced the exclusions into the number or will price them into the invoice.
7. Who picks it up if you disappear.
The answer is a written handover kept current as the build goes, the code in your repository, and a named person who has been briefed. Refuse to hire anyone, solo or agency, who cannot show you all three.
If you have already signed
Ask questions two and three anyway. If the site has not launched, a migration on its own is quoted after I have seen how many old pages need redirecting. Fixed quote after scope, before any deposit. It covers the origin probe, the redirect map, the baseline and the full legacy set verified against staging before DNS moves. Your builder keeps building. I own the URLs. It must be commissioned before launch, because the baseline cannot be taken after the old site is gone.
If you have not signed, the seven answers above are what a website build with me includes. The price is fixed after scope. Most sites do not need a rebuild. If yours does not, I will say so on the call.