Your site's folder: the nine things that have to be in your hands

Here is a test that takes ten seconds and needs no technical knowledge at all.

Could you, tomorrow morning, on your own, without phoning anybody, move your site to another provider?

If you thought “yes, of course”, stop reading and go and enjoy your coffee. If you thought “I would ask X”, then X is holding your key. If you thought “which X, I have not been able to reach him since last year”, this was written for you, and you will not enjoy it, but you will need it.

I am not writing it to accuse any colleague. In the overwhelming majority of cases there is no bad intent, there is haste. The site gets delivered, everyone is pleased, and nobody sits down to write out what belongs to whom. Until somebody needs it.

Let us look at what has to be yours

Nine things. With their proper names, because knowing what something is called is half the job when you are asking for it.

1. The domain name. Not merely “I have my site”, but: in the registry, the holder shown is you or your company. Not the builder, not the hosting company, not the nephew who helped out in 2019. Who pays and who holds are two different things, and I give that its own article because it deserves one.

2. Access to the DNS. This is the panel that says where your name points. Without it you cannot change provider, you cannot stage a test site, you cannot fix your email. It is the most underrated key on the list, because it is invisible for as long as everything works.

3. The hosting account. In your name, with your billing details, with an email address you control. If your site lives inside your builder’s account alongside thirty others, you do not have an account. You have accommodation in somebody else’s house.

4. The code. Yes, even if you have no idea what to do with it. You will not read it, you will hand it to the next person. It is the plans of the house: you never look at them, until somebody has to open a wall. Ask for it in a repository or, at worst, as an archive with a date on it.

5. The database and the backups. With the emphasis on the second, and with one word that changes everything: tested. A backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup. It is hope with a date stamped on it.

6. The certificate and how it renews. You do not need to know what TLS is. You need to know whether it renews itself, who pays if it does not, and who will notice if it expires. Usually the customer notices, via the “not secure” warning, and tells you in their own way.

7. Search Console and Analytics. You as owner, the builder as a user. It is one setting, it takes two minutes, and it is the difference between keeping your history and losing it along with a working relationship. History cannot be rebuilt. It is the only item on this list that money will not buy back.

8. Your domain’s email records. They live in the same place as the site, in DNS. A hurried migration that copies only the site records cuts the company’s email, and nobody spots it until the first “I sent you an email and heard nothing”. What SPF, DKIM and DMARC are is explained in the article on landing in spam.

9. The third party accounts hanging off the site. The payment gateway, the chat widget, the cookie tool, the maps key, the newsletter service. Each one is an account somewhere, with charges and with access. If they all sit under the builder’s email address, your site has that many small keys you are not holding.

And now the awkward question: how many of the nine do you have?

Do not answer from memory. Open them and look. Most people doing this exercise for the first time find three or four, and the rest are “with so and so”.

That is not a disaster. It is borrowed, though, and borrowed things have a habit of being called in at the worst possible moment.

What to do if they are missing, without wrecking the relationship

First this, and I will labour it: do not ask for all of them in one message. A list of nine demands landing out of nowhere smells of conflict, and the other person will get defensive even with nothing to hide.

Ask first for the second and the first: DNS access, and confirmation that you are the holder of the name. Everything else hangs off those two, and those two are the ones money cannot rebuild.

Then work down one at a time, in the tone the truth allows: you want them because they belong to the business, not because you are planning to leave. With serious colleagues that conversation lasts five minutes and ends with “sending them over today”. Where it does not end that way, you learned something useful and it cost you nothing.

When is the right moment

At the start, not at the end. While everyone is pleased, the list is a handover procedure. Once something has gone wrong, that exact same list reads as an accusation and takes months.

On my own projects, handover includes these nine, written down, with names and addresses. Not because I am especially gracious, but because I have seen far too many times what the alternative costs. And because, in all honesty, I do not want to be anybody’s key. I want to be their choice.

Would you like to go through which of the nine are missing from your own folder, with no commitment and without needing to know what any of them mean? Send me a message. The exercise takes twenty minutes and usually comes as a relief, even when the result is unflattering.