Maybe the emails have stopped getting answered. Maybe every small change takes weeks and costs more than it should. Maybe the person who built your site has simply vanished. Whatever the reason, you have decided it is time to move your website to a new designer, and you are not sure where to start.
I hear a version of this story a lot. It is one of the most common reasons people come to me. So this is a plain guide to what you need, what a good handover looks like, and how to make sure you never end up here again.
First, work out what is actually yours
Your website is not one thing. It is a few separate things that work together, and you need access to each of them. Before you speak to anyone new, find out where you stand with these four.
Your domain name. This is your web address. It is registered with a company called a registrar, and someone has a login for that account. That someone should be you. Your domain is the thing your business genuinely owns online, so if it is registered in someone else’s name, sorting that out is your first job.
Your hosting. This is where your website lives. It is a paid account with a hosting company, and again, someone has the login. If you pay the hosting bill, you have a right to that access.
Your WordPress admin. If your site runs on WordPress, there is a login that lets you into the back of your own site. You should have one, with full admin rights, whether you ever plan to use it or not.
Your email. If your email address ends in your domain name, it is tied up in all of this too. Know where it is set up before anything moves, because losing your website for a day is annoying. Losing your email is a crisis.
If you do not have some of these, do not panic. Ask for them in writing, politely. Most designers will hand them over without any fuss. It is your business and your accounts, and a professional knows that.
What a good handover looks like
A good handover is quiet. You ask for your logins, you get them within a few days, and the new designer takes it from there. There is no drama, no long silence, and no surprise invoice for releasing what was already yours.
When someone moves their site to me, I ask for four things: the domain registrar login, the hosting access, the WordPress admin, and the details of how the email is set up. Then I take a full backup of the site and handle the transfer myself. You do not need to touch anything technical. Your job is getting the logins. Mine is everything after that.
A bad handover looks different. Requests go unanswered for weeks. Access arrives in dribs and drabs. The domain turns out to be registered to someone who is hard to reach. None of this is a reason to stay put, but it is a reason to start early and keep everything in writing.
Should you move the site or rebuild it?
Once you have access, there is a decision to make. Do you move the existing site as it is, or start fresh?
Sometimes moving it is the right call. The site works, you like it, and the problem was the relationship, not the design. A straight transfer keeps everything you have and changes who looks after it.
Sometimes a rebuild is cheaper than a rescue. My rough rule: if a site arrives so broken that its styling does not even load properly, patching it up will cost more than starting again. A site in that state has usually been neglected for a while, and a fresh build on solid ground beats months of fixing things one by one.
You do not need to make this call yourself. It is exactly the sort of thing to ask a new designer about before any money changes hands. I look at the site, tell you honestly which way I would go, and give you a fixed price either way.
How to avoid ending up here again
Whoever you move to next, me or anyone else, there is one thing to insist on from day one.
Admin access to your own site.
You should always be able to log in to your own website. You might never use it. That is fine. The point is that the door is open and you hold a key. A designer who resists giving you that access is telling you something about how the relationship will go.
While you are at it, check the domain is registered in your own name, with your own email address on the account. And keep a simple note of where everything lives: registrar, hosting, WordPress, email. One page. It will save you a lot of grief if you ever need to move again.
None of this is about distrust. I give every client admin access as standard, and I would think less of any designer who did not. It is your website. You should hold the keys to it.
