Every project ends with a handover. Most handovers are a zip file and a password. Then six months later the client wants to move something and finds out the domain is registered to a person who left the agency in 2023. Sorting that out takes weeks and sometimes money.

Six things should sit in your company’s name. Check them at the start of a project, not at the end, because fixing ownership while everyone is still friendly takes fifteen minutes and fixing it later does not.

The domain comes first. It should be registered to your company with your email as the admin contact. Agencies often buy it for you as a convenience and then it quietly lives on their account for years. Log in to the registrar today. If you cannot, or if the name on the record is not yours, that is the one to fix this week.

Hosting works the same way. We are glad to manage a hosting account for you. Managing it and owning it are different things, and the account should be yours either way.

Analytics and Search Console need your Google account listed as an owner, not as a user. Access can be revoked by whoever granted it. Ownership cannot. People discover the difference at the worst possible moment.

The code should be in a repository you can open, with the commit history intact. A zip of the final build is not the same thing. History is what lets the next developer work out why a strange line exists instead of deleting it and breaking checkout.

Keep the original content files and the licences for anything you paid for. A stock photo licence bought in an agency’s name does not travel with the website, which is a nasty surprise to receive in an email from a picture library.

Last, the admin account on the site itself, held by you, with a role nobody else can remove.

Publishing this list costs us something. A client who owns all six can leave on a Friday afternoon and be somewhere else by Monday. That is the point. We would rather be kept because the work is good than held because the passwords are ours.

If you are mid project with somebody else right now, you can still run the check. None of it requires their cooperation except the last two, and their answer tells you plenty.

Get the free site audit ›››

All posts ›››