The Website Handover: What You Should Receive From Any Studio

Most firms spend months choosing a studio, approving designs and rewriting service pages. Then the site launches, everyone is relieved, and the project quietly ends with a thank-you email. What rarely gets the same attention is the website handover: the moment when the thing you paid for actually becomes yours.

It is easy to see why. Launch feels like the finish line, and by then the team is tired of the project. But a handover done properly is what separates owning a website from renting one. When it is skipped, the gaps tend to surface at the worst possible time: a domain that lapses because the renewal went to a former supplier's inbox, a partner who cannot update a bio without raising a ticket, a new agency that cannot start work because nobody knows who holds the logins. None of these problems are dramatic on day one. All of them become expensive later.

Whether you are launching next month or launched three years ago, it is worth knowing what a complete handover looks like.

Ownership Comes Before Everything Else

Start with the things that should be registered in your firm's name, not the studio's. The domain is the most important. It should sit in an account your firm controls, with billing and renewal notices going to an address inside your organisation, ideally a shared one rather than a single employee's inbox. If the studio registered it on your behalf, ask for it to be transferred now, while the relationship is good.

The same principle applies to the platform itself. Whether the site runs on Framer, Webflow, WordPress or anything else, the project or hosting account should belong to you, with the studio invited as a collaborator. A studio can still do excellent ongoing work as a guest in your account. What it should not be able to do, even by accident, is hold your website hostage because an invoice was disputed or a contact person left.

Finally, check the accounts that sit around the site. Google Search Console, your analytics property, your Google Business Profile and any form or booking tools should all be owned by the firm. These hold years of data about how clients find you, and that history is very difficult to rebuild.

Access for the People Who Need It

Ownership is about who holds the keys. Access is about who can open which doors. A good handover leaves you with a clear list of every system the website depends on, who has access to each, and at what level.

In practice this means at least two people at your firm with administrator rights to the core platform, so the site never depends on one person's availability. Day-to-day editors, such as the person who publishes news or updates team pages, should have their own named logins with editing rights rather than a shared password. Former employees and freelancers should be removed.

Store the credentials in your firm's password manager, not in an email thread from launch week. And ask the studio to confirm in writing which access it is keeping for ongoing support, so that nothing is left in place by default.

The Assets and Licences You Already Paid For

A website is built from many parts that live outside the pages themselves. The design files, usually in Figma, should be shared with you or exported. The original high-resolution photography and illustrations should be delivered, not only the compressed web versions. If a logo or icon set was created for the project, you should receive the source files.

Licences deserve particular care. Fonts, stock photos and some plugins are licensed rather than owned, and the licence is often tied to whoever bought it. Ask for a short list of every licensed element, who holds the licence, and whether it covers your use if you ever change studio. A font licensed to the agency rather than your firm is a small detail that can force an unwanted redesign years later.

If any custom code was written, such as a calculator, a booking integration or a component unique to your site, ask where it lives and confirm that you have the right to keep using and modifying it.

Documentation and Training That Fit Your Team

The most useful handover document is short. It should explain how the site is structured, how to add or edit the content your team touches most often, which parts are fragile and best left to a specialist, and who to contact when something breaks. A few screen recordings of common tasks are often worth more than a long manual nobody opens.

Training should be built around the people who will actually maintain the site. For a law firm that might be a marketing coordinator publishing articles and an office manager updating staff profiles. For a fund it might be someone in investor relations who needs to post reports on a schedule. A thirty-minute session for each of them, recorded, prevents most of the small requests that otherwise land back with the studio.

It also helps to agree what happens in the first month after launch. Small fixes and adjustments are normal once real visitors arrive, and it is reasonable to expect a defined support window, along with clear terms for anything beyond it.

A Short Website Handover Checklist

If you want a quick test of where you stand, these are the questions to answer:

• Is the domain registered to your firm, with renewals going to a shared internal address?

• Does your firm own the platform or hosting account, with the studio as a collaborator?

• Are Search Console, analytics and your Business Profile owned by the firm?

• Do at least two people inside the firm have administrator access?

• Have you received the design files, original images and a list of licences?

• Is there a short guide and recorded training for the people who edit the site?

If any answer is no or unclear, it is usually a fifteen-minute conversation with your current studio to put right, and far easier now than during a dispute or a deadline.

A good studio will raise all of this before you have to ask. At Filip & Philip we treat the handover as part of the work rather than an afterthought, because a client who could leave at any time is the best evidence the relationship is worth keeping. If you would like a second pair of eyes on what you received at launch, get in touch and we will go through it with you.