Blog

HOW TO HIRE A WEBSITE DESIGNER IN 2025

When we talk about building a proper website, there are many pieces to the puzzle—researching, wireframing, designing graphics, and ensuring a smooth user experience, just to name a few. You may be asking why crafting a website that offers unique, high-performing, and beautifully crafted experiences is essential. 

Reports show that 50% of users say a website’s appearance is how they judge the brand. In other words, you may lose 50% of customers because of your website design. 

Hiring a professional web designer to combine the pieces and build a high-quality, modern website is vital. After all, according to Statista, in 2024, over 5 billion people have access to the Internet, so the scale of users you can reach with your website is gigantic.

Now, imagine visitors landing on your site and instantly understanding what you do and how it benefits them through powerful visual storytelling. That's what a skilled web designer brings – they transform pageviews and clicks into leads that have the potential to become customers. 

Let’s uncover everything you need to know about hiring the best web designers for your needs. 

Benefits of Hiring a Professional Web Designer

Your website should communicate your message and help visitors understand your brand. It can be a powerful tool for making an excellent first impression on your prospects and giving them precisely what they want. 

This is what adequately done web design takes care of. Let’s look at some of the most prominent benefits that you’ll get when you hire a professional website designer.

A showcase of all the benefits you get by hiring a web designer, such as: unique website experiences, high-performing websites, and saving resources.

High-quality web experiences

Your website is an online ambassador of your brand. Web designers will transform website woes into user-friendly wins, keeping visitors engaged and happy.

Their work includes brainstorming, planning, and building web pages that deliver your message. To achieve this goal, web designers must combine various visual elements, such as graphics, photos, texts, and animations, with UX/UI techniques and some technical implementation. 

Despite advancements in AI and no-code web development that allow even non-technical people to try their hand at designing websites, this is a challenging job for anyone who doesn’t have the necessary background. 

The most possible result of not having the expertise will be crafting a website that looks and feels amateurish. If that’s your customers' first impression of you, how will they feel about your services? Did you know that 88% of customers won’t return to a website if they have a bad experience?

Bring your vision to life

A skilled web designer will be your partner in bringing your vision to life. They'll take your ideas and transform them into a stunning online reality. But it's a two-way street!  Clear and open communication throughout the project is crucial. Sharing your thoughts, inspirations, and feedback ensures your website reflects your unique brand and goals.

Your web designer can gain a deep understanding of your vision through brainstorming sessions and collaborative discussions. 

This collaborative approach ensures that your website is more than just beautiful and strategically designed to achieve your business objectives. So don’t just hire them and never speak with them again.

Save time and resources

Experienced web designers understand industry-specific design theory principles and know how to structure websites to ensure a smooth user experience. 

Studies show that a well-designed user interface can increase conversion rates by 200% – that's like turning window shoppers into paying customers!

Access to a variety of skills and expertise

Another benefit of hiring a professional Web designer is that they are committed to exploring different tactics to make their work more efficient and effective. 

They understand the value of researching the audience, mapping out different versions of UX, and conducting A/B tests to create a proper user interface. In short, they can put themselves in the user’s shoes and build websites from their perspective.

How to find and hire a website designer in 4 steps

Looking for perfect candidates can be challenging when you need to hire a website designer for your company. However, you can go through a couple of steps to choose the most reliable candidates for the job. 

Let’s take a look at the essential steps for finding a high-quality website designer that adds high value to your team:

Step 1: Determine your business goals and needs

It all starts with mapping out your company’s objectives and business goals. You must have a clear vision before investing your time and resources into hiring a website designer. 

So, consider your company’s overall objectives and clarify the message you want to convey with the website you want to create. You need to answer the following questions, at minimum. 

  • Who exactly is the target audience? 
  • How do you want them to perceive your brand? 
  • What do you want them to do through your website? 

This last question is crucial to define your website’s direction. Take it seriously. 

Understanding these core principles will help create a vision for the person you are looking for and for the objectives you have to attain through the website which will give you a better chance of achieving your goals.

Step 2: Research and screen potential candidates

So, your goals and objectives are all mapped out – awesome! 

Now, let’s look for a website designer for hire. It’s crucial to check web designers’ technical skills, including their understanding of UX design, UI elements, SEO best practices, HTML/CSS coding, and juggling design software like a pro. 

Of course, you’ll also want them to have the skills of a website creator, such as handling modern content management systems (CMS) to enhance or create pages. A website designer may also need to help with migrating assets from your current website to a more current one.  

This includes graphic design, typography, composition, and color theory. Besides all of this, a good website designer must also have proper communication, organization, and problem-solving skills, ensuring smooth interaction with the rest of the team. 

You’ll also want to research places where you can find web designers for hire. We’ll explore your best options in greater detail further down this article.

Step 3: Evaluating portfolios and previous work

After shortlisting the candidates based on their skills and how well they match your requirements, you’re one step closer to making your final choice. At this point, you must review your candidate’s work through their portfolios and see the results they’ve achieved for their past employers. 

Generally, it’s a good sign if a website designer has poured much time and energy into creating a beautifully crafted portfolio with polished, professional-looking, and eye-catching examples of their previous work. 

This way, you can check their style and approach to website design and see if they align with your vision for the projects you’d like to execute with them. However, you must be aware that a beautiful portfolio won’t always mean they’re great additions to your team or that their skills reflect the portfolio 100%.

A screenshot from Awesomic's case studies page, to showcase expertise and trustworthiness of the company.

The best way to ensure quality and communication is with a test task reviewed and created by web design experts. But what if you don’t yet have a design team or your current team is working at full capacity? You’ll have to look at alternatives like the Awesomic app.

Awesomic finds and vets candidates who are ready to jump in and contribute with high-value inputs in as few as 24 hours due to their technical skills and industry expertise. You tell us your business needs, and our AI algorithm will work its magic, matching you with designers who are a perfect fit! 

Now, to the fourth step: whether you decide to find a website designer all by yourself or hire a company that will do it for you.

Step 4: Communicating Your Project Requirements

Once you have chosen suitable candidates who meet your expectations, it is essential to communicate your project requirements to them and answer all of their questions about different aspects of the work. 

This can also be done after hiring as the first step of the boarding, but we don’t recommend it. This step will help them understand your vision and reduce the chances of misunderstandings, which often result in inefficient processes for both sides. 

You must communicate about project scopes, deliverables, deadlines, and specific requirements. It would also help if you could agree to schedule regular updates, ensuring consistent alignment on the project’s directions.

Other factors to consider when hiring a website designer

There are a couple of factors to consider when searching for a website designer. These professionals must possess high-level, comprehensive foundational skills to deliver websites that excite visitors about your brand. 

More specifically, the ideal candidates will know how to develop the user persona profiles, create different layout pages with the site map, and design user flows.  

Of course, this level of expertise and efficiency comes with years of relevant experience in the industry, so you should also be mindful of that factor. Experienced website designers know how to approach and solve a problem in a way that is appealing to your online visitors. 

Another relevant factor to consider is their design style and aesthetic, which includes theoretical knowledge of color psychology, web fonts, and grid systems, as well as their personal touch on the visual side of the website. 

This aspect is essential because a website designer’s style can influence your brand perception and should align with your ideal customer profile. 

Besides style, checking their expertise in responsive web design and the latest design trends is essential since most web traffic comes from mobile devices

StatCounter Globalstats showed that in December 2024 the mobile traffic online was 64.25%, and the rest were from desktops. This showcases how strong mobile experiences can lead to better business results.

A good website designer should be able to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. This includes ensuring that your website’s overall structure, layout, speed, mobile responsiveness, and performance are SEO-friendly. This allows you to rank higher on relevant keywords and attract organic traffic to your website. 

Lastly, your ideal candidate should have good time management skills. They'll have to juggle deadlines and deliverables like pros to ensure your project stays on track.

Other options to find a website designer for hire

When searching for the top talent to assist your web design efforts, there are a couple of places where you can find website designers and creators to consider. 

  1. Freelancing platforms
  2. Design agencies
  3. Design platforms and social media
  4. Web design subscription services

Let’s have a closer look at each one of them:

Freelance Web Designers

The first option is to look for an individual freelance web designer with good experience and expertise in their field. You can use platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, WorkingNotWorking, or others to choose top talent. 

Working with freelancers can be beneficial because of their cost efficiency and speed of work delivery. However, navigating freelance platforms and vetting candidates can take time, the time to fill for full-time positions in the US is around 40 days, and getting a freelancer who owns the projects and offers smooth communication is even more challenging. 

This is where agencies and other specialized companies thrive. Besides the time investment, there’s also the cost of unactualized revenue, the pay, and hidden costs such as revisions. 

As an app with web design specialists Awesomic, streamlines the process by AI-matching your project requirements with skilled designers in as few as 24 hours and offers guaranteed communication updates at least once every business day.

Design Agencies

Another way to proceed with hiring a web designer is to ask for help from design agencies that offer relevant services to your business needs. 

This way, you can access a wider team of experienced professionals, guaranteeing reliability and a smooth experience leading to your desired result. 

Agencies will have more resources to help you achieve your goals, but they are usually pricey. This is because agencies take a more holistic approach with multiple specialists in different areas working on your project. 

The key point here is to ensure the agency you’re employing is an agency that has an actual good balance of middle to senior designers and creative professionals working on your project instead of doing practices such as juniorization. And this requires a thorough vetting process.

Trustpilot is one of the main options you can use to check if a company is legit, alongside the others showcased in this article.

The most straightforward methods to finding an agency you like are to check review websites such as Clutch.co, look at websites you think would fit your company and try to find out who made them, and lastly, look into awards for web design and contact the winners.

Design Directories and Platforms

The design directory is where you can find a selection of web design service providers and professionals with their profiles and work examples. This way, you have many options when searching for a perfect provider for your company.

Some popular options are Dribbler and Behance, but you may need to look into more specialized spaces for web design. If you need illustrations, scouring social media and forums is still your best bet.

Web design subscription services

Another option for hiring someone to create and build your website is through web design subscription services since they usually offer plans with no-code web development. This means a web designer can make your website from the ground through platforms like Webflow and Framer. 

This is generally a great idea for companies going through branding updates, companies that need more upkeep with their website as they test new things to achieve more growth, scaleups, and startups that want to migrate their website and update its look and feel.

Webflow migration is one of the many services that Awesomic talents provided for Denario, which is showcased in this screenshot of their case studies page.

Another big plus from such services is that companies like Awesomic vet the designers, so you don’t have to. They’ll need minimal onboarding due to having industry expertise and working on similar projects in the past, and they’re middle to senior-level talent.

For instance, Awesomic’s Pro Plan offers web design through Webflow with vetted talent that can match your company in 24 hours and start working on your website’s project.

Tips for Finding the Ideal Web Designer for Your Business

If we look at the step-by-step approach to finding a perfect web designer to help your company shine online, it all starts with clearly defining your project requirements and expectations to determine what kind of talent you need to look for. 

It would help if you had a budget for the whole process to ensure that the expectations are aligned from both sides. 

Then, you are ready to find perfect candidates on relevant platforms. Remember to review your chosen candidate’s client testimonials and feedback from previous collaborators to avoid misunderstandings throughout the process. 

Or if you’re going to hire agencies or subscribe to an app like Awesomic, then you need to check their case studies, structure of project delivery, and their cost transparency. 

After that, you are ready to conduct interviews and vet your chosen web designer, check their personality and skills to see if they add or match with the team, and make the offer to the candidate who has a proven track record and is motivated to assist you in designing a perfect website for your business.

Find the perfect website designer for your needs with Awesomic

Hiring a reliable web designer can bring a lot of skill and expertise to your team – they listen to your ideas, do proper customer research, add their personal touch, and design web pages that excite your online visitors about your brand. 

But, as you know, it’s far from being an easy endeavor. After all, you’re trusting them with one of the most important aspects of your business, your virtual greeting card that will drive away or attract new customers: your website

Awesomic has helped over 4,000 companies with their tech and design needs and can connect you with vetted web designers who understand your needs because they have solved similar issues in similar industries.

We invite you to check out our Awesomic plans. There are no hidden fees, and you’ll get access to top-quality designers and creative talent in as few as 24 hours. You can also book a demo with the Awesomic team, and we’ll help you select the best plan for your business.

When we talk about building a proper website, there are many pieces to the puzzle—researching, wireframing, designing graphics, and ensuring a smooth user experience, just to name a few. You may be asking why crafting a website that offers unique, high-performing, and beautifully crafted experiences is essential. 

Reports show that 50% of users say a website’s appearance is how they judge the brand. In other words, you may lose 50% of customers because of your website design. 

Hiring a professional web designer to combine the pieces and build a high-quality, modern website is vital. After all, according to Statista, in 2024, over 5 billion people have access to the Internet, so the scale of users you can reach with your website is gigantic.

Now, imagine visitors landing on your site and instantly understanding what you do and how it benefits them through powerful visual storytelling. That's what a skilled web designer brings – they transform pageviews and clicks into leads that have the potential to become customers. 

Let’s uncover everything you need to know about hiring the best web designers for your needs. 

Benefits of Hiring a Professional Web Designer

Your website should communicate your message and help visitors understand your brand. It can be a powerful tool for making an excellent first impression on your prospects and giving them precisely what they want. 

This is what adequately done web design takes care of. Let’s look at some of the most prominent benefits that you’ll get when you hire a professional website designer.

A showcase of all the benefits you get by hiring a web designer, such as: unique website experiences, high-performing websites, and saving resources.

High-quality web experiences

Your website is an online ambassador of your brand. Web designers will transform website woes into user-friendly wins, keeping visitors engaged and happy.

Their work includes brainstorming, planning, and building web pages that deliver your message. To achieve this goal, web designers must combine various visual elements, such as graphics, photos, texts, and animations, with UX/UI techniques and some technical implementation. 

Despite advancements in AI and no-code web development that allow even non-technical people to try their hand at designing websites, this is a challenging job for anyone who doesn’t have the necessary background. 

The most possible result of not having the expertise will be crafting a website that looks and feels amateurish. If that’s your customers' first impression of you, how will they feel about your services? Did you know that 88% of customers won’t return to a website if they have a bad experience?

Bring your vision to life

A skilled web designer will be your partner in bringing your vision to life. They'll take your ideas and transform them into a stunning online reality. But it's a two-way street!  Clear and open communication throughout the project is crucial. Sharing your thoughts, inspirations, and feedback ensures your website reflects your unique brand and goals.

Your web designer can gain a deep understanding of your vision through brainstorming sessions and collaborative discussions. 

This collaborative approach ensures that your website is more than just beautiful and strategically designed to achieve your business objectives. So don’t just hire them and never speak with them again.

Save time and resources

Experienced web designers understand industry-specific design theory principles and know how to structure websites to ensure a smooth user experience. 

Studies show that a well-designed user interface can increase conversion rates by 200% – that's like turning window shoppers into paying customers!

Access to a variety of skills and expertise

Another benefit of hiring a professional Web designer is that they are committed to exploring different tactics to make their work more efficient and effective. 

They understand the value of researching the audience, mapping out different versions of UX, and conducting A/B tests to create a proper user interface. In short, they can put themselves in the user’s shoes and build websites from their perspective.

How to find and hire a website designer in 4 steps

Looking for perfect candidates can be challenging when you need to hire a website designer for your company. However, you can go through a couple of steps to choose the most reliable candidates for the job. 

Let’s take a look at the essential steps for finding a high-quality website designer that adds high value to your team:

Step 1: Determine your business goals and needs

It all starts with mapping out your company’s objectives and business goals. You must have a clear vision before investing your time and resources into hiring a website designer. 

So, consider your company’s overall objectives and clarify the message you want to convey with the website you want to create. You need to answer the following questions, at minimum. 

  • Who exactly is the target audience? 
  • How do you want them to perceive your brand? 
  • What do you want them to do through your website? 

This last question is crucial to define your website’s direction. Take it seriously. 

Understanding these core principles will help create a vision for the person you are looking for and for the objectives you have to attain through the website which will give you a better chance of achieving your goals.

Step 2: Research and screen potential candidates

So, your goals and objectives are all mapped out – awesome! 

Now, let’s look for a website designer for hire. It’s crucial to check web designers’ technical skills, including their understanding of UX design, UI elements, SEO best practices, HTML/CSS coding, and juggling design software like a pro. 

Of course, you’ll also want them to have the skills of a website creator, such as handling modern content management systems (CMS) to enhance or create pages. A website designer may also need to help with migrating assets from your current website to a more current one.  

This includes graphic design, typography, composition, and color theory. Besides all of this, a good website designer must also have proper communication, organization, and problem-solving skills, ensuring smooth interaction with the rest of the team. 

You’ll also want to research places where you can find web designers for hire. We’ll explore your best options in greater detail further down this article.

Step 3: Evaluating portfolios and previous work

After shortlisting the candidates based on their skills and how well they match your requirements, you’re one step closer to making your final choice. At this point, you must review your candidate’s work through their portfolios and see the results they’ve achieved for their past employers. 

Generally, it’s a good sign if a website designer has poured much time and energy into creating a beautifully crafted portfolio with polished, professional-looking, and eye-catching examples of their previous work. 

This way, you can check their style and approach to website design and see if they align with your vision for the projects you’d like to execute with them. However, you must be aware that a beautiful portfolio won’t always mean they’re great additions to your team or that their skills reflect the portfolio 100%.

A screenshot from Awesomic's case studies page, to showcase expertise and trustworthiness of the company.

The best way to ensure quality and communication is with a test task reviewed and created by web design experts. But what if you don’t yet have a design team or your current team is working at full capacity? You’ll have to look at alternatives like the Awesomic app.

Awesomic finds and vets candidates who are ready to jump in and contribute with high-value inputs in as few as 24 hours due to their technical skills and industry expertise. You tell us your business needs, and our AI algorithm will work its magic, matching you with designers who are a perfect fit! 

Now, to the fourth step: whether you decide to find a website designer all by yourself or hire a company that will do it for you.

Step 4: Communicating Your Project Requirements

Once you have chosen suitable candidates who meet your expectations, it is essential to communicate your project requirements to them and answer all of their questions about different aspects of the work. 

This can also be done after hiring as the first step of the boarding, but we don’t recommend it. This step will help them understand your vision and reduce the chances of misunderstandings, which often result in inefficient processes for both sides. 

You must communicate about project scopes, deliverables, deadlines, and specific requirements. It would also help if you could agree to schedule regular updates, ensuring consistent alignment on the project’s directions.

Other factors to consider when hiring a website designer

There are a couple of factors to consider when searching for a website designer. These professionals must possess high-level, comprehensive foundational skills to deliver websites that excite visitors about your brand. 

More specifically, the ideal candidates will know how to develop the user persona profiles, create different layout pages with the site map, and design user flows.  

Of course, this level of expertise and efficiency comes with years of relevant experience in the industry, so you should also be mindful of that factor. Experienced website designers know how to approach and solve a problem in a way that is appealing to your online visitors. 

Another relevant factor to consider is their design style and aesthetic, which includes theoretical knowledge of color psychology, web fonts, and grid systems, as well as their personal touch on the visual side of the website. 

This aspect is essential because a website designer’s style can influence your brand perception and should align with your ideal customer profile. 

Besides style, checking their expertise in responsive web design and the latest design trends is essential since most web traffic comes from mobile devices

StatCounter Globalstats showed that in December 2024 the mobile traffic online was 64.25%, and the rest were from desktops. This showcases how strong mobile experiences can lead to better business results.

A good website designer should be able to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. This includes ensuring that your website’s overall structure, layout, speed, mobile responsiveness, and performance are SEO-friendly. This allows you to rank higher on relevant keywords and attract organic traffic to your website. 

Lastly, your ideal candidate should have good time management skills. They'll have to juggle deadlines and deliverables like pros to ensure your project stays on track.

Other options to find a website designer for hire

When searching for the top talent to assist your web design efforts, there are a couple of places where you can find website designers and creators to consider. 

  1. Freelancing platforms
  2. Design agencies
  3. Design platforms and social media
  4. Web design subscription services

Let’s have a closer look at each one of them:

Freelance Web Designers

The first option is to look for an individual freelance web designer with good experience and expertise in their field. You can use platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, WorkingNotWorking, or others to choose top talent. 

Working with freelancers can be beneficial because of their cost efficiency and speed of work delivery. However, navigating freelance platforms and vetting candidates can take time, the time to fill for full-time positions in the US is around 40 days, and getting a freelancer who owns the projects and offers smooth communication is even more challenging. 

This is where agencies and other specialized companies thrive. Besides the time investment, there’s also the cost of unactualized revenue, the pay, and hidden costs such as revisions. 

As an app with web design specialists Awesomic, streamlines the process by AI-matching your project requirements with skilled designers in as few as 24 hours and offers guaranteed communication updates at least once every business day.

Design Agencies

Another way to proceed with hiring a web designer is to ask for help from design agencies that offer relevant services to your business needs. 

This way, you can access a wider team of experienced professionals, guaranteeing reliability and a smooth experience leading to your desired result. 

Agencies will have more resources to help you achieve your goals, but they are usually pricey. This is because agencies take a more holistic approach with multiple specialists in different areas working on your project. 

The key point here is to ensure the agency you’re employing is an agency that has an actual good balance of middle to senior designers and creative professionals working on your project instead of doing practices such as juniorization. And this requires a thorough vetting process.

Trustpilot is one of the main options you can use to check if a company is legit, alongside the others showcased in this article.

The most straightforward methods to finding an agency you like are to check review websites such as Clutch.co, look at websites you think would fit your company and try to find out who made them, and lastly, look into awards for web design and contact the winners.

Design Directories and Platforms

The design directory is where you can find a selection of web design service providers and professionals with their profiles and work examples. This way, you have many options when searching for a perfect provider for your company.

Some popular options are Dribbler and Behance, but you may need to look into more specialized spaces for web design. If you need illustrations, scouring social media and forums is still your best bet.

Web design subscription services

Another option for hiring someone to create and build your website is through web design subscription services since they usually offer plans with no-code web development. This means a web designer can make your website from the ground through platforms like Webflow and Framer. 

This is generally a great idea for companies going through branding updates, companies that need more upkeep with their website as they test new things to achieve more growth, scaleups, and startups that want to migrate their website and update its look and feel.

Webflow migration is one of the many services that Awesomic talents provided for Denario, which is showcased in this screenshot of their case studies page.

Another big plus from such services is that companies like Awesomic vet the designers, so you don’t have to. They’ll need minimal onboarding due to having industry expertise and working on similar projects in the past, and they’re middle to senior-level talent.

For instance, Awesomic’s Pro Plan offers web design through Webflow with vetted talent that can match your company in 24 hours and start working on your website’s project.

Tips for Finding the Ideal Web Designer for Your Business

If we look at the step-by-step approach to finding a perfect web designer to help your company shine online, it all starts with clearly defining your project requirements and expectations to determine what kind of talent you need to look for. 

It would help if you had a budget for the whole process to ensure that the expectations are aligned from both sides. 

Then, you are ready to find perfect candidates on relevant platforms. Remember to review your chosen candidate’s client testimonials and feedback from previous collaborators to avoid misunderstandings throughout the process. 

Or if you’re going to hire agencies or subscribe to an app like Awesomic, then you need to check their case studies, structure of project delivery, and their cost transparency. 

After that, you are ready to conduct interviews and vet your chosen web designer, check their personality and skills to see if they add or match with the team, and make the offer to the candidate who has a proven track record and is motivated to assist you in designing a perfect website for your business.

Find the perfect website designer for your needs with Awesomic

Hiring a reliable web designer can bring a lot of skill and expertise to your team – they listen to your ideas, do proper customer research, add their personal touch, and design web pages that excite your online visitors about your brand. 

But, as you know, it’s far from being an easy endeavor. After all, you’re trusting them with one of the most important aspects of your business, your virtual greeting card that will drive away or attract new customers: your website

Awesomic has helped over 4,000 companies with their tech and design needs and can connect you with vetted web designers who understand your needs because they have solved similar issues in similar industries.

We invite you to check out our Awesomic plans. There are no hidden fees, and you’ll get access to top-quality designers and creative talent in as few as 24 hours. You can also book a demo with the Awesomic team, and we’ll help you select the best plan for your business.

WitH Awesomic, you let us know the destination — we match you with the crew