Check who owns your website before you need to know

A recurring call we get goes roughly like this. The site needs a change, the person who built it is unreachable, and nobody at the company has the login for anything.

Sometimes it is worse than an inconvenience. A domain registered in someone else's name is, in a practical sense, theirs.

The audit you can do this afternoon

1. Look up your domain in a public WHOIS search. Whose name and email is on it?
2. Log into your hosting account. Can you, personally, get in?
3. Find your source code. Is the repository under a company account or a personal one?
4. Check your app store listings. Are they published under your developer account?
5. Ask where the database backups go and confirm someone has restored one.

If you cannot answer all five, that is the actual project to run next, ahead of any redesign.

Leaving your developer should be straightforward. That it so often is not says more about the arrangement than the code.

What good handover looks like

Everything in your name. A written record of where each service lives and what it costs. A restore that somebody has actually performed rather than assumed. And documentation aimed at the next developer, not at us.

We include all of that in the final week because a proper handover is part of the job.