Website handover checklist for the client

Handover day is one working day when you and your contractor walk through the finished project and take possession of everything that makes the site yours: access credentials, source files, documents. When that day passes as a formality, two weeks later you find out that only the developer has the hosting password, the design files sit in somebody’s personal account, and form inquiries land in a mailbox nobody opens.

Below is the full list of what gets checked on delivery day and what you take away with you. It works the same for a landing page, a corporate site and a store, and only the amount of catalog and payment testing differs. None of it requires reading code. Set aside a working day, and avoid signing off the same morning you first see the site.

What you are actually accepting

Owners tend to reduce the handover to one question, “does the site open?”. It almost always opens, so the view has to be wider. A project consists of three parts, and each can fail on its own.

• The site itself. Pages, texts, images, forms, cart, mobile version. Everything your customer sees and does.
• Access and ownership. Domain, hosting, control panel, business email, analytics, payment dashboards. All of it registered to your company.
• Project materials. Source code, a copy of the database, design files, an administrator guide, a list of connected services.

The first part is usually in order, because it gets prepared for the demo. Problems hide in the second and third, and surface months later, when you have already parted ways with the contractor.

The normal timeline for a project like yours is in our article on how long website development takes. A finish date that jumps forward is a reason to inspect closely.

Access without which the site is not yours

This is the most expensive part of the list. A site can be rebuilt, while a domain registered to an outside person takes months to get back. Verify every item personally, with your own password and from your own computer, while the developer is available.

Domain

The registration has to be in the name of your company or in your own name. Log in to the registrar with your credentials and look at the owner contact details. If the agency is listed there, ask for the domain to be moved into your account before anything is signed. Check the renewal date and switch on automatic payment, because a forgotten domain takes down the site and the mail at once.

Hosting and business email

You need access to the hosting panel separately from the site admin area. The panel holds files, the database, mailboxes, certificates and backups. Ask to be shown where backups are switched on. Test the mail on your domain there too. Write to the address from the contacts page and confirm the message arrives and stays out of spam.

Admin area and user accounts

Create an account for yourself with administrator rights and log in with it. Then open the list of users and find out who each one belongs to. Temporary freelancer logins, test users with simple passwords and forgotten interns are the most common way in for attackers. Everything unnecessary gets deleted while a person who remembers each account is around.

Third-party services and payment dashboards

Put together a list with your developer of everything connected to the site: analytics, maps, live chat, email marketing, card payments, couriers, ad accounts. Next to every line there has to be an account that you own. The most frequent trap is analytics set up on the agency’s email address, because with the change of contractor you lose the whole history of visits.

Checking the site through a visitor’s eyes

Now open the site the way a customer will: in a private browsing window, without administrator rights, and from a smartphone on mobile data. The developer’s laptop with its saved cache is no good here.

• Every page in the menu. Go through every item in the top menu and in the footer. Empty sections, duplicates and placeholders along the lines of “text coming later” show up in a few minutes.
• Forms. Fill in every form with real data. The message has to reach your working mailbox, and no developer address should remain in the settings.
• Phone numbers and messengers. Tap the number on a smartphone, check the chat buttons, the links to your social accounts and the map with directions.
• Company details. Legal name, registration data, address, opening hours, shipping and returns terms. Customers notice errors in exactly these lines.
• Mobile version. Repeat on the phone the path you took on the computer. Watch the tables, the long headings and the menu that covers the content.
• Site search. Type a product or service name with a typo in it and see whether the site still finds the right page.

Collect everything you find in one document: page link, short description, screenshot. Scattered chat messages get lost, and some fixes are never completed.

The technical part that is easy to miss

These items are invisible on the screen, and they decide whether search engines find you and whether the site runs without surprises. The check takes half an hour, and skipping it costs months.

Security certificate and duplicate addresses

The site has to open only over the secure https address. Check every spelling variant: with www and without, with http and https. The extra ones have to redirect to one main address, otherwise a search engine sees several copies of the site and splits trust between them.

Visibility in search

On delivery day the site is often still closed to search engines, because that suited development. Ask to open the robots.txt file and the CMS settings, so you can be sure the block is lifted. There also has to be a generated sitemap and Google Search Console connected to your email. Without these steps the project stays invisible for months.

Speed and images

Measure the speed of the home page and of a product page through the free PageSpeed Insights tool, on the mobile tab. The usual reason for a slow site on delivery day is heavy photos uploaded straight from the camera. We took that apart in the article on why your website loads slowly. Now it is corrected in a few hours; with the catalog filled in, the same work grows several times over.

Analytics and lead tracking

The visitor counter has to be present on all pages without exception. Confirm separately that a form submission is recorded as an event, because otherwise you see traffic and no inquiries, so the advertising budget gets spent blind. Ask for a test inquiry to be sent and shown in the report.

Extra checks for an online store

A store carries a layer a brochure site lacks: money, stock and delivery. Checking it takes several hours, and shortening that is risky. Platform specifics are on the e-commerce website development page.

• A full test order. Walk the buyer’s path from end to end: product search, filter, cart, checkout, payment with a real card for a small amount. Then refund the money through the payment dashboard.
• Order emails. The notification has to reach the buyer and the manager. Compare the total, the company name and the contacts, and check that the message stays out of spam.
• Shipping and payment. Calculate delivery cost for different cities, check weight limits, the free shipping threshold and every payment method on the site.
• Stock levels. An item that is out of stock should not be orderable. Look at how a product page behaves with a zero balance.
• Sync with your back office. If the store is tied to accounting software or a marketplace (Amazon, Etsy or a regional equivalent), ask for a full sync cycle while you watch, with the result shown in both systems.

Agree separately on who fills the catalog. The estimate has to say how many product pages the agency creates and how many you create, and in what form photos and descriptions are handed over. This boundary is blurred more often than any other.

Documents and files you take away

Next comes the paperwork. The list is short, and gathering it six months later is often impossible.

Warranty deserves its own paragraph in the contract. Spell out what counts as a developer’s error and what counts as a new task with its own price, how quickly free fixes are made, how long the warranty runs, and the rate for work beyond it. Otherwise every request after delivery turns into an argument.

Where owners go wrong most often

Mistakes at handover repeat from project to project. These cost owners the most.

• Sign-off happens on trust. The money is transferred, the contractor is free, and the list of unfinished items stays a verbal agreement. Replies get slower every week.
• The site is accepted from the developer’s screen. On that computer everything works, because the passwords and the cache are saved there. Your customer arrives from another device and sees another picture.
• Only the home page gets attention. It gets polished, while the contacts page or a service page stays in draft condition.
• The phone gets ignored. Most visitors arrive on a smartphone, and that is where most of the defects turn up.
• Nobody asks who runs the site next. After delivery the project needs updates, backups and monitoring. Arranging that before signing is easier.

One more signal is a contractor reluctant to walk the list with you. A normal agency offers that meeting itself and brings its own checklist. Other warning signs are gathered in our article on how to choose a web agency.

Conclusions

Handover day costs you a few hours of attention and saves you from the most expensive problems: a lost domain, vanished analytics, a site that search engines never see. The order is simple. First take the access credentials and verify them personally. Then walk the site as a customer would, from a phone. After that comes the technical part and, for a store, a full order cycle with payment. At the end you collect the documents and fix the warranty in writing.

As soon as the site is delivered, the project moves into a stage where response speed and regular maintenance matter. What to do from there we described in the article on the first 90 days after launch. The minimum for any site is updates, backups, uptime monitoring and a person you can write to on a working day.

This work is covered either by one-off requests from $20/hr, or by a technical plan from $400 a month, where updates, backups and monitoring run on a schedule. Busy stores take packages with a reserve of hours: from $800 a month for 40 hours and from $1,600 a month for 80 hours with a dedicated manager. The scope of each option is listed on the project support and development page.

If you are accepting a site now and have doubts about its quality, write to us. We will look at the project from our side and send back a list of what is worth demanding before you sign.