Who really owns your website? 5 things to take delivery of
The site is live and working. If you parted ways with your developer tomorrow, what would you actually be left with? Check this list on handover day.
Maybe a quarter of the jobs that come to me start with the same sentence: "We can't reach the person who built our old site." The questions after that never change. Who has the domain, where is the hosting, what's the panel password?
Spend ten minutes on handover day checking these five things and you won't end up there.
1. The domain
You should be able to log into the registrar with your own account. "It's in the developer's account but I have access" isn't enough. If that account closes or the password changes, you have nothing.
Run a whois lookup and see who the registrant is, or log into the registrar and check the domain shows up in your account.
2. Hosting
The server account should be in your name and the invoices should come to you. If your site lives on your developer's own server, it goes down when that relationship ends.
At the very least, ask for the hosting panel login, FTP/SFTP access and the database details.
3. Source code and database
You should have a full copy of the site's files and a database backup. Get them once and keep them somewhere safe.
If the site was custom-built, ask for the version history (the git repository) too. Without it, whoever takes over the code next has a much harder job.
4. Admin accounts
These accounts should belong to you, with the developer added as an invited user:
The website admin panel, where the top-level account is yours
Google Search Console and Analytics, where you are the property owner
Google Business Profile
Payment provider accounts
Email service
If these are tied to the developer's Google account, you lose years of data when you part ways. There is no way to get Analytics history back.
5. Content and images
You should have the original, high-resolution versions of the photos on the site. Compressed copies downloaded from the site won't be good enough for a future redesign.
If stock images were used, ask whose name the licence is in. If it's the developer's, you can't keep using them.
What to do on handover day
Once you have the details, try each one from your own computer. Log in, look around the panel, open the backup and check there are files in it.
You don't want to find out six months later, in the middle of a problem, that a password you never tried doesn't work.
On every project I hand these five items over in one document and ask the client to log in while I'm still there. It takes ten minutes and puts us both at ease.