The 15 Questions Your Web Developer Should Ask Before Building Your Website

Most website projects start the same way.

Someone schedules a kickoff call. There’s some friendly small talk. Then the conversation turns to the website — and within about ten minutes, you’re deep into a discussion about colors, fonts, hero images, and whether the navigation should be sticky.

Design matters. We’re not dismissing it — we’ve won awards for our website designs. A well-crafted site that looks confident and loads beautifully still sets a tone that nothing else quite replicates.

But if design is the majority of the conversation before anyone opens a design file, something important is getting skipped.

Marketing.

A website isn’t just a design project. It’s the foundation of your marketing system — and the questions asked at the very beginning of a project determine whether what gets built will actually perform, or just look nice while it quietly does nothing.

We ask a lot of questions before we touch anything related to your website, over time and through experience. Probably more than most. It might seem a little annoying, if we’re being honest, but it’s also why the sites we’re involved in tend to work. So after plenty of lessons learned, here are the sixteen questions we think a marketing-aware developer or agency should be asking before a single wireframe gets drawn.

If these questions never come up in your conversations with a developer, it’s worth asking why.

The 15 Questions Your Web Developer Should Ask — Quick Reference

Is this website being built to be found by AI?
Who is your ideal customer?
What problems are your customers searching for?
What actions do you want visitors to take?
How will leads be captured?
How will we measure success?
What keywords should each page target?
What content already exists that can support the site?
What questions do your customers ask most often?
What marketing channels will drive traffic to the site?
How will the website be updated over time?
How will performance be monitored?
How will conversions be tracked?
What content will support long-term SEO?
Who will own the marketing infrastructure?
How will this website support business growth?

1. Who Is Your Ideal Customer?

Not “everyone.” Everyone is not your customer.

A marketing-ready website starts with a clear picture of who it’s trying to reach — because different audiences require different messaging, different page structures, and different calls to action. Without that clarity, you end up with a site that’s trying to speak to everybody and connecting with nobody.

2. What Problems Are Your Customers Searching For?

SEO doesn’t begin with keywords. It begins with customer problems.

People don’t usually search for a company name or even a service category. They search for the thing that’s keeping them up at night. Understanding that search behavior is what shapes how a marketing-ready website should be structured — and which pages actually have a shot at being found.

3. What Actions Do You Want Visitors to Take?

Every page on a website should have a purpose. Not a vague “learn more” purpose — an actual, measurable action.

Request a quote. Book a reservation. Download a guide. Schedule a call. If those conversion goals aren’t defined before development begins, the site will struggle to guide anyone toward anything useful.

4. How Will Leads Be Captured?

A contact form is not a lead capture strategy. It’s a starting point.

A marketing-ready website considers the full picture: inquiry forms, gated content, newsletter signups, live chat, and event registrations. And those leads need to go somewhere — ideally a CRM or marketing system that lets you actually do something with them.

5. How Will We Measure Success?

This question determines the analytics framework—and it should be answered before a single line of code is written.

At a minimum, the site needs Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console.

Why Your Website Probably Isn’t Built for Marketing

Beyond that, success metrics should be defined in advance: traffic targets, conversion rates, and keyword rankings. If you don’t know what winning looks like, you won’t know when you get there.

6. What Keywords Should Each Page Target?

Every major page on a marketing-ready website should be built around a specific search intent — not just what the company wants to say, but what customers are actually typing into a search engine.

This isn’t an afterthought you hand off to an SEO plugin after launch. It’s a structural decision that shapes how pages are written, titled, and how they relate to each other. Getting it right from the start is significantly cheaper than retrofitting it later.

7. What Content Already Exists That Can Support the Site?

Starting from scratch is expensive and usually unnecessary. Most organizations have more useful content than they realize — existing copy, case studies, testimonials, FAQs, blog posts, brochures, sales scripts.

A good agency takes inventory before creating anything new. What’s worth keeping? What needs updating? What can be repurposed? The answers shape the scope and the budget.

8. What Questions Do Your Customers Ask Most Often?

Your sales team and customer service inbox are a goldmine of SEO content. The questions customers ask in real life are often the exact phrases they type into search engines.

If those questions aren’t being answered somewhere on the website — in a blog post, a resource page, an FAQ section — you’re leaving some of the easiest search traffic on the table.

9. What Marketing Channels Will Drive Traffic to the Site?

A website doesn’t exist in isolation. It lives inside a broader marketing ecosystem — search, social, email, paid ads, referrals, word of mouth.

The answer to this question changes how the site should be built. A business that drives most of its traffic from paid search needs different landing page structures than one that’s primarily organic. Building without knowing this is like designing a parking lot before you know how people are getting there.

10. How Will the Website Be Updated Over Time?

A website that nobody can update goes stale. Fast.

Who’s adding blog posts? Who’s updating service pages? Who’s swapping out offers and seasonal content? If the answer is “we’ll figure it out,” the content management setup is probably going to create problems — both for the team managing it and for the search engines trying to crawl it.

11. How Will Performance Be Monitored?

Building the analytics infrastructure is one thing. Actually, having a plan to look at it is another.

Who’s reviewing the data? How often? What are the thresholds that trigger action? A marketing-ready website isn’t a “set it and forget it” asset — it’s a living system that needs regular attention. The monitoring plan should be part of the conversation from day one.

12. How Will Conversions Be Tracked?

This is different from question 5. Measuring success is the strategy. Tracking conversions is the plumbing.

Every meaningful action on the site — form submission, phone call, download, purchase — should fire a tracking event. Without that, you can see that people visited your site. You just can’t tell whether any of them did anything worth caring about.

13. What Content Will Support Long-Term SEO?

A website isn’t just the pages that launch on day one. It’s also the content ecosystem that grows around it over time — blog posts, resource libraries, case studies, and landing pages.

A thoughtful agency asks about this upfront because the site’s architecture needs to support it. Navigation, URL structure, internal linking strategy — these decisions are much easier to make before launch than after.

(This is the whole premise behind the Barnacle Blog, incidentally.)

14. Who Will Own the Marketing Infrastructure?

Somebody has to be responsible for the analytics, the tag management, the Search Console — and it probably shouldn’t be the developer who built the site and moved on.

This question surfaces a gap that causes real problems: the website launches, the developer relationship ends, and suddenly nobody knows where the GA4 account lives or who has access to it. Sorting out ownership before launch prevents a lot of headaches.

15. How Will This Website Support Business Growth?

This one sounds obvious. It isn’t.

“Support business growth” means different things to different organizations — more leads, more foot traffic, better-qualified prospects, reduced customer service load, faster sales cycles. The website should be built to serve a specific growth goal, not just to exist as an online presence.

When this question gets answered clearly at the start, every other decision — architecture, content, functionality, analytics — has a north star to orient around.

One More: Is This Website Being Built to Be Found by AI?

We said fifteen questions. We lied. There’s a sixteenth — and right now it’s the one almost nobody is asking.

Search isn’t just Google anymore. AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity are changing how people find businesses — and they work very differently from a traditional search engine. Instead of returning a list of links, these systems synthesize information from across the web and deliver a single answer. If your website isn’t structured to be understood and cited by those systems, it may not show up at all.

The disciplines behind this are called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). AEO is about structuring your content so AI systems can extract and surface it as a direct answer. GEO is about making your content the authoritative source that those systems want to cite. And agentic search — AI systems that actively gather information on behalf of a user — is the next layer on top of all of it.

The good news: the foundation for AEO and GEO is the same as good SEO. Well-structured, authoritative, clearly written content. This is another reason why getting the website marketing setup right from day one matters more than ever.

We’re dedicating an entire post to this topic — it’s that important.

The Real Difference Isn’t Budget. It’s Curiosity.

The gap between a developer-built website and a marketing-ready website usually isn’t about what the developer knows. It’s about what they think to ask.

A technical developer can build exactly what you specify. A marketing-aware partner pushes back on the spec — because they’re thinking about how the site performs after it launches, not just whether it renders correctly in Chrome.

The fifteen (or sixteen, who’s counting?) questions above aren’t a formula. They’re a mindset. And if the people you’re working with aren’t asking them, it’s worth a conversation about why they aren’t.