Your web developer isn't
telling you the whole story.
Not out of bad faith. But their business model doesn't reward informing you about what genuinely needs to happen with your site right now. That's why you're better off with a partner whose interests are actually aligned with yours.
Why this happens
Three business models where the supplier's interest clashes with yours.
Hourly rate
Rewards problems, not solutions. The more that's broken, the more gets billed. A supplier on an hourly rate has no incentive to be proactive — every conversation is either billable time or free advice they don't want to give away.
"We just carried out the migration. That you lost 30% of your rankings, we had no idea."
Retainer
Rewards silence, not value. A fixed amount per month for "availability" with no defined deliverables. The less you ask, the more profitable. The supplier has an active interest in not telling you what needs doing.
"We've been hosting your site for years. Whether the structured data still works? No idea, we don't check that."
Project + maintenance
Rewards delivery, not the outcome. The moment your site went live, the developer's interest was complete. What happens after that — SEO, conversions, AI visibility, security updates — isn't their problem.
"The site was delivered as agreed. Whether it's still findable today is a new assignment."
None of these three models is wrong because the supplier is bad. They're wrong because the incentive is misaligned. You pay for activity, not for outcome.
What they don't tell you
Ten things that directly affect your site and that your current developer should have proactively flagged.
01 Migration costs you rankings +
A badly executed migration costs 15–40% of organic traffic on average, with 3–6 months of recovery. Did you know that? Or did your developer just say "we'll move it, it'll take so many hours"?
02 Accessibility Act (EAA) +
Mandatory for most B2C sites since June 2025. Fines up to €100,000. Has your developer told you this? An audit plus fix is work, so they stay quiet until you ask yourself.
03 AI visibility (GEO) +
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews already reference websites — or don't. That depends on structured data and content architecture. Your developer has rarely optimised for it.
04 Cookie compliance +
A quickly bought cookie banner or a free plug-in often doesn't meet GDPR requirements. Risk: fines and exclusion from Google/Microsoft Ads.
05 Structured data disappeared +
During CMS updates or theme changes, JSON-LD often disappears silently. Your rich snippets are gone, your CTR drops. Nobody monitors this.
06 Page speed regression +
Gradual plug-in additions make your site slower year after year. Core Web Vitals turn red. Google penalises that. Your developer doesn't email you about it.
07 Backlinks lost +
External sites remove or change links to your site. Nobody replaces them or asks for them back. Domain authority erodes.
08 Security updates delayed +
Postponing WordPress / Drupal / Magento updates is asking for trouble. Your developer waits until you ask yourself — or until something gets hacked.
09 Analytics decay +
Tracking tags silently stopped working after a CMS update. You collect no data for weeks or months. You don't know it, because the dashboard sits at zero (or empty).
10 Competitors catch up +
Nobody compares you to your market every month. You think you're doing fine — until your new leads halve.
Want to know which of these ten apply to your site right now?
Book a call →How EASEO works differently
Fixed monthly output. Defined up front. Our interests aligned with yours: growth of your site means continuation of the subscription.
Fixed deliverables
Every month you know exactly what you get: strategic advice, SEO & content, technical maintenance, development hours. No "we'll see". No surprise invoices. No extra-work discussions.
Proactive, not reactive
We flag your problems before they become visible. Performance regression, broken structured data, cookie non-compliance — you get it in your monthly report. Not once Google has already penalised you.
No lock-in
Cancel monthly. Code, content, hosting and analytics remain yours. If we stop, your site keeps running. No hostage-taking of your digital infrastructure.
One point of contact
No account manager passing problems to an agency that passes them to a freelancer. One party that takes responsibility for strategy, technology and growth.
| Hourly rate | Retainer | EASEO subscription | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Predictable monthly cost | No | Yes | Yes |
| Fixed deliverables per month | No | Rarely | Yes |
| Proactive alerts | At an hourly rate | No | Yes |
| Strategic advice | At an hourly rate | No | Yes |
| Cancel monthly | N/A | Sometimes (annual contract) | Yes |
| Ownership of code & data | Varies | Varies | Fully yours |
| Interest aligned with growth | Opposed | Neutral | Aligned |
"We thought our web developer was handling everything. When we looked at it together properly, 47 things turned out to be off — nobody had ever told us it was going wrong."
— What an average introduction call uncovers
Book a call →Three ways to start
How far along are you? Pick your next step.
Introduction call
In half an hour we map out where your site stands: what needs to happen, in what order and with what priority. You'll know afterwards what's going on and what the logical next step is.
Free
no obligation, no strings attached
Book a call →Monthly subscription
Fixed deliverables, fixed price, cancel monthly. Strategic advice, SEO & content, technical maintenance, development hours. Three tiers depending on your pace of growth.
from €1,000
per month · annual discount available
View pricing →One-off services
Have a concrete project — migration, GEO audit, EASEO CMS setup, VvE portal? Our one-off services work standalone or as a step towards the subscription.
from €250
one-off per service
View services →Prefer to talk first? Email info@easeo.nl or call 020 369 2949.