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Nobody plans the website handover at the start. It gets thought about on the day someone decides to change agency, which is the worst possible day to start thinking about it.
By then the conversation has already turned slightly cold, and you are asking for logins from people who have just found out they are losing the account. Most hand everything over without fuss. Some take three weeks to answer an email. A few discover, genuinely, that nobody at the company knows where the domain was registered six years ago.
None of that is a disaster if you already hold the accounts. All of it is a problem if you do not.
So this is the list, and the order to do it in. Read it now rather than on the day you need it, because the whole point is that the work happens while everyone is still friendly.
Eleven things. Go through them and mark each one as held by you, held by the agency, or unknown.
Item eleven is the one people skip. A backup you have never opened is a file, not a backup.
Anything marked unknown is the real output of this exercise. Unknown means you do not own it yet, whatever the contract says.
Two steps, and the sequence matters more than either step on its own.
First, while the relationship is normal, ask for the handover items as routine housekeeping. Most of them are reasonable to request at any point in a working relationship, because they are yours. You do not need a reason, and inventing one makes it sound like you have one.
A straightforward way to put it: we are tidying up our records and want every account registered to us directly, so can you send over what is outstanding.
Second, once you hold everything, you can give notice whenever you like, and the notice is no longer a negotiation. It is just a notice.
Doing it the other way round means asking a company you have just fired to do unpaid administrative work for you, which is a bad position even with people who behave well.
One more thing while you are in there. Check which email address is on each account. An account registered to a developer’s personal address is a problem waiting for the day that person leaves their own company.
A handover has two sides, and this part gets written about far less often.
Agencies talk to each other, and the web industry in any given city is smaller than it looks. An exit handled properly costs you nothing and is remembered. One handled badly is also remembered.
There is a practical reason too. The people leaving know things about your site that are not written down anywhere, and you will want to be able to send one more question in six weeks when something odd surfaces.
Most businesses doing this find two or three unknowns and one account sitting on a personal email address. That is a normal result, and it is far easier to fix on an ordinary Tuesday than during a change of supplier.
If you would rather have someone go through it with you and tell you what is missing, that is part of our free audit. We will say so if everything is already in your name.