Five things to check before you pay for a website
I’ve inherited a lot of other people’s websites. A decade in IT will do that to you: the developer moves on, the business needs something changed, and the person who picks it up finds out what was really under the bonnet.
Almost every horror story traces back to a question nobody asked at the start. So here are five. Ask them of whoever you’re about to hire — including me. If someone gets cagey on any of them, that’s your answer.
1. Whose name is on the domain?
This is the big one. Your domain should be registered to you or your company, in an account you can log into, with billing on your card. Not in your developer’s reseller account, not on their credit card as a favour.
A domain registered to somebody else is the single most effective way to be held hostage, and it’s usually done with no bad intent at all — it was just easier at the time. Then the developer stops answering emails and your business email goes down with the renewal.
Ask: “Will the domain be registered in my name, in an account I control?” The only acceptable answer is yes.
2. What happens if you leave?
Ask directly: if we part ways in two years, what do I walk away with, and what does it cost me? You want to hear that you get the code, the database, the content, the hosting account and the analytics — and that they’ll help with the handover rather than charge an exit fee.
Be especially careful with proprietary platforms where the site can’t exist outside the builder’s own system. That’s not a website you own, it’s a rental with a bespoke paint job.
3. Who is actually going to build it?
At an agency, the person selling you the work is often not the person doing it. That’s normal, but you should know it, and you should know how many other projects that person is carrying. “How many builds are you running at once?” is a fair question and the answer is genuinely informative.
4. What’s the backup story?
Not “do you do backups” — everyone says yes. Ask: how often, where are they stored, how long are they kept, and when did you last actually restore one? A backup nobody has ever tested is a hope, not a backup.
- Daily, automated, and off the same server as the site.
- At least thirty days of history, so a problem you notice late is still fixable.
- A restore that’s been tested — ideally in the last quarter.
- Somewhere you can get to them without the developer, if it comes to that.
5. Who answers when it breaks at 6pm on a Friday?
Sites break. Certificates expire, hosts have outages, a plugin update goes sideways. What matters is what happens next. Is there a named person? A response time you can actually rely on? Or is it a shared inbox and a hope?
You don’t need a 24/7 enterprise SLA for a small business site. You do need to know the honest answer, so you’re not finding it out during the outage.
Ask me these too
I’d rather you asked. For the record: your domain goes in your name, you own everything and I’ll help you move it if you ever want to, I build it myself, backups are daily and off-site with tested restores, and when it breaks you email me and I answer.
That last one is only credible because I keep the client list short. Book a call if you want to talk it through.