Who builds your website: the questions to ask before you say yes

Whose name is the domain in?

The domain is the address of your site and your email: the one printed on your business cards and your van. It must be registered to you or your company, not to whoever builds the site. If it is in the supplier's name and one day they disappear, or you simply stop working together, the address your customers know is not yours.

Ask whose name it will be registered in, and have them show you in the registrar's panel.

Will you hand over every login?

There is only one right answer: yes, always, even if they then manage it. The logins are:

• the domain panel;
• the server or hosting the site runs on;
• the site's admin;
• email;
• Google's tools: Search Console, the business profile, the analytics.

How to keep them? The simplest way is to write them on paper and keep it somewhere safe, with the company's documents. A password manager works too. What matters is that they exist somewhere other than someone else's memory.

If I switch supplier one day, what do I take with me?

Ask whether the site can be moved: the files, the text, the photos, the database. Some closed platforms do not allow it: the site only lives there, and if you leave you start from scratch. That is not necessarily a reason to say no, but it is something to know up front. How to move without damage is in Changing hosting or domain without vanishing from Google.

What does the yearly fee cover, and what not?

A website has costs that come back every year: the domain, the server, maintenance. Get in writing what is included: updates, backups, renewals, small text changes. Many people turn maintenance down because it looks like paying for nothing. In fact it covers updates to the site and to the server it runs on, and that is what keeps it safe: more in Website maintenance.

How long am I committing for?

We offer one year for server and domain. It is a sensible investment: the right amount of time to see whether the site brings in customers, and if it does not, you simply do not renew. A few months are not enough to judge: Google takes weeks just to get to know a new site properly, and anyone expecting to double their customers in a month is disappointed and pulls out just as the site starts to work.

How will I know the site is working?

Ask which numbers you will be able to see: visits, the searches people find you with on Google, the calls and messages that come from the site. It sounds obvious, but in the sites we audit 28% have no tool at all to measure visits: no way of knowing whether the site is doing its job.

All the questions together

1. Whose name will the domain be in?
2. Will you hand over every login, in writing?
3. If I switch supplier, can I take the site with me?
4. What does the yearly fee cover, and what costs extra?
5. How long am I committing for?
6. Which numbers will I see to know whether the site works?

They are the same questions we answer first when someone asks us for a website. If you want to ask them, write to us.