What Web Developers Don’t Tell You

A new website usually begins with a mood board and a quote. It should also begin with a frank conversation. Most projects don’t fail on code; they fail on expectations. The details that rarely make it into sales calls—maintenance, performance budgets, accessibility, SEO handover, content responsibility—are the same details that decide whether your site becomes an asset or a headache.

The first silent truth is that a website is not a one-time purchase. You are buying a living system made of a domain, DNS, hosting, SSL, a database, third-party services, and a content platform. Those pieces renew, update, and sometimes break. Someone must own backups, uptime monitoring, security patching, and restore tests. If that “someone” isn’t named in the agreement, it’s you by default. A proper proposal spells out who monitors the site, how often backups run, where they are stored, how long they are kept, and how a restore works at two in the morning.

Performance is the second quiet issue. Beautiful templates and page builders ship quickly, but every plugin and animation has a cost in kilobytes and CPU. Without a performance budget, pages grow heavy, Core Web Vitals slump, and conversions slide. A developer who intends to keep you fast will set targets for Largest Contentful Paint, interaction latency, and total page weight, agree on the analytics that will measure them, and design within those limits. If you hear only “it will be fast,” you won’t know what “fast” means until launch day.

Search visibility often sits between disciplines and falls through the cracks. Development is not the same as SEO. A reliable build covers the technical foundation—clean URLs, proper status codes, structured data where it matters, canonical tags, a migration plan for any URL changes, and a robots policy that won’t surprise you. The rest—keyword strategy, content, internal links—is editorial work that someone must own. If no one owns it, don’t expect rankings to follow the redesign.

Accessibility is another place where reality and sales copy diverge. Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA requires design and development choices from day one: color contrast, focus states, keyboard paths, ARIA only when semantics aren’t enough, form errors that speak aloud, and content that works with screen readers. It adds time because it adds craft. It also protects you from legal risk and opens the door to users you would otherwise exclude. If your audience includes Arabic speakers or right-to-left layouts, budget for proper RTL support; it isn’t a switch, it’s a second set of design decisions.

Plugins promise features on tap but can become quiet sources of lock-in. Licenses renew yearly. Updates can break layouts. Vendors change hands. A trustworthy developer lists every dependency, why it was chosen, who pays for the license, and how you would replace it if the vendor disappears. Where possible, they favor standard frameworks and first-party capabilities so you can change providers later without rewriting everything.

Timelines are honest only when they include your part. Most delays come from missing copy, unapproved designs, unedited images, and slow feedback loops. Development moves quickly until it needs real content and real decisions. Good teams reduce friction with templates, content checklists, and short review windows, and they freeze changes before launch so the cutover is clean. The old “cheap, fast, good—pick two” triangle still applies; if you push for all three, quality is the part that yields.

Security is rarely exciting until it is. Forms that collect personal data need consent language. Admin panels want rate limiting, multi-factor authentication, and IP alerts. File uploads need validation. If your site takes payments, the card gateway should own the card forms so you never touch PCI scope. Your developer should document the threat model in plain language and confirm who responds to incidents and how.

Testing is more than “looks fine on my screen.” Real QA defines a browser and device matrix, tries slow 3G, turns off JavaScript where appropriate, and verifies that emails, webhooks, analytics events, and sitemaps behave in production. A staging site should mirror production closely enough that bugs found there are meaningful. When the project closes, you should receive admin access, repository access, credentials stored safely, and a short runbook so your team can operate the site without guesswork.

Ownership deserves paperwork. You should own the domain, the hosting account, the code you paid for, and the design assets—excluding clearly licensed third-party components with their own terms. If a developer wants to host for you, that can be convenient; it should still be portable. Ask for the process to move elsewhere and read it before you sign. A mature provider makes leaving as clear as joining.

If you want to protect your budget and your sanity, ask a few unglamorous questions early and insist on written answers. Who monitors uptime and applies updates? What are the performance targets and how will we measure them? Which accessibility level are we building to? What happens to search URLs and structured data at launch? Who writes, edits, and publishes the content, and when? Which plugins are licensed to whom? How are backups restored, and how long does it take? What is included in support, what is not, and what are the response times? Who owns the domain, the code, and the design files?

Web developers don’t hide these truths because they’re villains. They often avoid them because projects are easier to sell when they sound simple. Your job is to make the invisible visible. When the agreement names responsibilities, when the plan includes performance and accessibility, when migration and monitoring are part of the budget, you get what most site owners want but rarely receive: a website that works, then keeps working.