What handover means
A website is handed over when you could, tomorrow, hire a different developer and they could take it on without asking the old one for anything. Logins, ownership, knowledge, all in your hands. Most small business sites never reach that state. The developer keeps the hosting login "to make updates easier", the domain is registered in their name, nobody wrote anything down, and the relationship works until it does not.
Here is what a complete handover includes, and how to reconstruct one if yours never happened.
The checklist
Accounts in your name
- Domain registrar. The account that owns your domain name is in your name, with your email and your payment card. This is the single most important item; whoever controls the domain controls the business's online identity.
- Hosting. Your account, your card. The developer can have a user login, not the account.
- Email service, if the site sends mail through one.
- Booking tool, payment processor, analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile. Each one: your account, with the developer added as a user where needed.
If any of these are in the developer's name, the handover is not complete, whatever else was delivered.
Logins, stored properly
A list of every login the site depends on, in a password manager shared with you, not in an email. Website admin, hosting control panel, database if applicable, domain registrar, DNS if separate, every third-party service.
The site itself
- Admin access at the highest level. You may never use it. You must have it.
- The code, if the site is bespoke, in a repository you can access, or a zip of it on your own storage.
- A recent backup, and confirmation of where ongoing backups go and how to restore them.
Documentation
One document, however short:
- What the site is built on, and what version.
- How to edit the common things: text, photos, prices, staff, opening hours.
- Which plugins or services it depends on and what each does.
- Where the backups are and how to restore.
- Renewal dates for domain, hosting, certificate and any licences.
- Who to contact for what.
Training
A recorded walkthrough of the editing you will do yourself. A video you can rewatch beats a live session you forget. Fifteen minutes is enough for most sites.
The paper
An invoice marked paid, and a line, in the contract or an email, confirming you own the site, the content and the design outright. Not a licence. Ownership.
If your site was never handed over
Work through the list and find out where you stand.
Find out who owns the domain. Look it up in any WHOIS tool; many registrars hide details, but the registrar's name will show. If you cannot log in to that registrar, the domain is not yours in practice. Ask the developer, in writing, to transfer it to an account in your name. This is a routine process at every registrar and takes days. A developer who refuses is telling you something.
Find out where the site is hosted. The IP address of your domain, checked in any DNS lookup tool, identifies the hosting company. Ask the developer for the account or for a transfer of the site to hosting you control.
Get admin access to the site. Ask for an administrator login. If the developer is unreachable, the hosting company can often give you access to the files and database, which is enough for another developer to recover it.
Ask for the documentation. There may be none. That is common and not a crisis; a competent developer can reconstruct the essentials in a couple of hours.
Do it while the relationship is fine. The hard cases are always the ones where the developer has vanished or the relationship has soured and the domain is about to expire. Recovering access is far easier as a routine request than as a dispute.
A note on "we host it for you"
Many small agencies bundle hosting and keep it in their name because it is simpler for them and creates a monthly income. It is not inherently bad, but it should be a choice you make knowingly, with the domain in your name regardless, and with a written commitment that they will transfer the site to you on request. If those two things are missing, you are renting your own website.
How we hand over
Every website we build ends with this list, ticked, before the final invoice. Domain and hosting in your name, logins in a shared vault, the documentation and the recorded walkthrough sent the day we go live, and ownership stated in writing. It costs us an hour. It means you never need us, which is the only basis on which a client should choose to keep working with anyone.