Most businesses check a web developer's portfolio and references before hiring them. Far fewer check whether that developer is actually insured, registered for data protection, or has any plan for what happens if they become unavailable. Those questions matter more than they might seem, especially for a site that handles customer data, payments, or anything the business depends on daily.
Anyone handling data connected to your users, contact forms, account details, order history, is legally required to register with the Information Commissioner's Office under UK data protection law. It costs very little and takes minutes to set up, so a developer who hasn't done it either doesn't know the requirement exists or hasn't taken it seriously. The ICO register is public and searchable, so this is one of the easiest things to check independently rather than take someone's word for it.
Two types of cover matter for anyone doing technical work on your site. Professional indemnity covers mistakes and oversights in the work itself. Cyber insurance covers incidents involving data: a breach, a hack, exposed customer records. Without either, a mistake or a security incident becomes the business's problem to pay for, not the developer's.
It's worth asking for the actual policy limits, not just confirmation that insurance exists. £50,000 of cover and £1,000,000 of cover are both technically "having insurance," but they cover very different scales of problem.
Ask what happens to the business if the developer is unreachable for a month, whether that's illness, a family emergency, or simply moving on to something else. Is there documentation another developer could pick up from? Is there anyone else who has ever touched the codebase? A single point of failure isn't unusual for a smaller supplier, but it's worth knowing about before signing rather than discovering it during an emergency.
Checking these things properly takes a few minutes. Search the ICO register directly instead of relying on what a supplier tells you. Ask for a certificate of insurance instead of a verbal confirmation. If they mention documentation or a backup plan for unavailability, ask to see an example.
If you're evaluating a developer or agency and want a second opinion on what to ask, get in touch with Karl.
Related Services
When a website handles live transactions, staff workflows, or customer accounts, the people responsible for it ask harder questions before bringing in external support. This is what procurement teams and IT managers typically check, and what it means in practice when you are looking for specialist ExpressionEngine or Craft CMS support.
Plenty of ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS sites run on a single relationship: a freelancer who built the site years ago and has quietly maintained it since, or an in-house hire who set everything up and never wrote any of it down. That works fine for years. Then that person goes on holiday during a launch, gets a new job, or stops replying to emails, and the business finds out how much depended on one inbox.
Most clients come to us when their site has started to feel like a risk rather than an asset. Whether the agency relationship has ended, an upgrade has been delayed, or the site has simply grown beyond what it can handle, a conversation costs nothing.
Get in touch with KarlTrusted by established businesses and growing brands across the UK
Expression 37 works with a small number of clients at any one time. These are some of them.
Karl founded Expression 37 in 2007 and has worked exclusively with ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS ever since. He does not take on work in other platforms and does not hand work to other developers. Expression 37 is deliberately small, because the kind of support that matters to clients with business-critical sites is specific to their site, not something that scales in the conventional sense. If you work with Expression 37, you work with Karl.
Find out how we workWe were looking for a new ExpressionEngine developer to take over the development of our current SHN website, and Karl came highly recommended from one of our design agency contacts. The service we get from Karl is of a very high standard, and we a really pleased with the results that he constantly produces. Karl has proved to be an excellent web developer partner so far, and we highly recommend his services.
Tim Pogson
Scotland Housing Network