How do I move my website to a new designer? The eight-item handover
Almost everyone starts this in the same wrong place: I paid for the website, so the website is mine, and moving it is a matter of asking politely. The UK Intellectual Property Office disagrees with the first half of that. On commissioned work its published position is that "the first legal owner of copyright is the person or organisation that created the work and not you the commissioner, unless you otherwise agree it in writing".
That is not a scare line and it is not usually a problem. Most British web designers hand everything across without a murmur, because they would rather have a clean exit than an argument. But it explains why moving is a handover rather than a repossession, and why the people who get stranded are almost never the ones who picked a crooked designer. They just did the right things in the wrong order.
Eight things have to change hands. Here they are in the order they have to happen, and the one item that decides whether the other seven are a formality or a fight.
Move eight assets before you cancel anything: domain, hosting, site files, CMS logins, email, Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics, and any licences bought for you. Take the domain first, because it is the only one that cannot be rebuilt. In a UK WHOIS run of 412 trade domains, about one in six sat in somebody else's account. Give notice only once the domain is in yours.
The eight things that have to change hands, in order
A website is not one asset. It is eight separately held ones, usually spread across four or five different companies, and a handover is only complete when every line below has moved into an account you can log into yourself.
Work down it in this order. The numbering is not decoration: items 1 to 3 are the ones that strand people, and everything from item 4 onward can be rebuilt from scratch in a week if it goes missing.
- 1. The domain name. The only irreplaceable item on the list. It has to end up in a registrar account you opened, with your own email on the record. Everything else on this page is recoverable; this is not.
- 2. Search Console and Analytics. Not the data, the verified ownership. Do this before you give notice, for the reason set out further down, because losing it is silent and you will not notice for months.
- 3. The Google Business Profile. The thing that actually feeds a trade phone. If your designer claimed it, it is in his Google account, not yours.
- 4. The hosting account. Either transferred to you, or made redundant because the new site is going somewhere else. Ask which, and ask when the current billing period ends.
- 5. The site files. The code, the templates, the images at full resolution. Ask for the original photographs rather than the compressed versions on the page, since those are frequently the only copies left.
- 6. The CMS or builder login. Admin access, not an editor account. On WordPress that means an administrator user; on a hosted builder it means whoever the account is billed to.
- 7. Email. Routinely forgotten, and the one that stops the business dead the same afternoon. If your address runs through the same provider as the site, moving the domain badly can take the email with it.
- 8. Licences and anything paid for on your behalf. Premium plugins, a stock photo licence, a booking tool, an SSL certificate bought separately. Get a list, with renewal dates, and check what is in his name.
The order is what people get wrong, not the list. The normal sequence is: get fed up, email notice, then start asking for logins. That is backwards. Notice is the moment your designer's incentive to help drops to zero, and it is also the moment he stops being paid for his time. Nothing gets cancelled, and no notice gets given, until items 1 to 3 are sitting in accounts of yours. Done that way round, this is an admin job of a couple of hours spread over a fortnight. Done the other way round, it becomes a recovery, and a recovery is measured in weeks.
Why the domain has to be first
Rankings, email and every printed van and business card in the UK all point at the domain, not at the website. Lose the site and you rebuild it. Lose the domain and you change the name of your business.
This is also where the numbers say the risk actually sits. Across 412 real trade domains pulled from my own cold-call audit sheets and run through Nominet's WHOIS, 69 of the 409 that resolved were registered with a registrar appearing three times or fewer in the whole sample. That is the signature of a domain opened inside a small web design or IT company's own account rather than by the tradesman. Roughly one in six. The full method and the rest of that dataset is in who actually owns my domain name.
None of those six hundred-odd businesses did anything wrong. Somebody offered to sort the domain out during the build, which was genuinely helpful at the time, and nobody wrote down where it landed.
How a .uk transfer actually works
The transfer itself is close to instant. Nominet's own position is that "if the domain is unlocked and the Transfer Authorisation Code is correct, the transfer will complete immediately for .UK domains." Everything slow about it is human.
The Transfer Authorisation Code has replaced the old IPS tag process for .uk names. Your current registrar generates it and gives it to you; your new registrar takes it and pulls the domain across. A TAC is valid for 14 days from the time it is generated, so ask for it when you are ready to use it rather than filing it away in March for a move in June.
Worth knowing, because it is the part people assume is not true: Nominet keeps a three-way contractual relationship, holding a contract with the registrar under the .UK Registry-Registrar Agreement and one with the registrant under the .UK Registrant Terms and Conditions. If you are named as the registrant, you are not a bystander to your own domain, whoever happens to be managing it. If you are not named as the registrant, that is the thing to fix first, and it is a different job from a transfer.
What you are owed, and what you have to ask for
The default legal position on a freelance build is that the designer keeps the copyright and you keep the domain. Almost everything else on the list is a courtesy you should get in writing rather than an entitlement you can demand.
The IPO puts the freelance case plainly: "Where a person works under a 'contract for services' he will usually retain copyright in any works he produces, unless there is a contractual agreement to the contrary." An employee is the opposite, and a web designer you hired is almost never an employee. This cuts against me exactly as much as against anybody else, which is why a transfer of ownership belongs in writing at the start rather than in an argument at the end.
| Asset | The default position | What to ask for, in writing |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Yours if you are the named registrant, whoever manages it | The Transfer Authorisation Code, and the registrant name on the record |
| Design and code | His by default on a contract for services, unless assigned in writing | A one-line assignment of copyright, or written permission to keep using it |
| Your own photos and text | Yours. You made them, he only published them | The originals at full resolution, not the compressed web versions |
| Stock images and plugins | Licensed, often to him and not transferable | A list with renewal dates, and which name each sits in |
| Google accounts | Whoever holds the account, which is a Google question and not a legal one | Verified owner status for you, added before anything is cancelled |
The sentence that avoids all of this next time
Whoever you move to, get one line in the agreement: on final payment, the copyright in the site transfers to you, and the domain is registered in your name. That is the whole fix. It is also the reason my own arrangement hands the site and the domain over at twelve months as a matter of course, rather than as something you have to ask for.
The two accounts nobody asks for
Search Console and the Google Business Profile are the two items on the list that can be lost quietly, months after the move, and neither is covered by anything your designer sends you.
Google's documentation on Search Console draws a hard line between a verified owner, "someone who verified ownership of the property using a token", and a delegated owner, granted status by a verified owner without a token. It matters at exactly one moment. Google states that "if all verified owners are removed, then all remaining users and delegated owners will lose access to the property after a grace period", with data still collected but nobody able to see it. If your designer is the only verified owner and his token comes off the site during a rebuild, your access goes with it and nothing tells you.
The Business Profile has its own route and its own clock. If the profile is in someone else's account you can request ownership, and Google says "the current profile owner is then notified by email and has 3 days to respond". Three days is a short window to hang a trade phone on, so it is far better to be added as an owner while everyone is still speaking. What you should be seeing in either account once you have moved is covered in what a monthly report should actually show you.
How long it takes and what it costs
An amicable move done in the right order is about two hours of your time across a fortnight, and the only unavoidable cash cost is the domain renewal, typically £8 to £15 a year for a .co.uk.
The cost only climbs when the order goes wrong. Once notice has been given and the domain is still in a stranger's account, you are into chasing, and if it goes properly bad you are into Nominet's dispute process, which is a slower and more formal thing than any of the above. A genuine contract dispute is a solicitor's job rather than a web designer's, and anyone in my trade who tells you otherwise is guessing.
When not to move at all
If your only complaint is slow replies, and the domain and the Google accounts are already in your own name, you have a communication problem rather than a supplier problem, and moving will not fix it.
I would rather say that than take the work. Moving is worth it when you are paying for something you are not receiving, when the site cannot be changed without a fee every time, or when nobody has touched it in two years. It is not worth it because somebody took four days to answer an email in August. And if the honest problem is that you are paying for search work you cannot evaluate, that is a different question with a different answer, which I have set out in can I do my own SEO or should I pay someone.
If you are moving, my end of it looks like this. I do the eight-item list with you before anything is cancelled, and you get a free mockup of your actual business before you pay me anything: no deposit and no build fee, then £50 every four weeks covering the site, hosting, the domain, SSL, backups and unlimited small text and photo edits. Three months minimum, then rolling, first payment back if you do not like the finished site, and at twelve months the website and the domain are yours to keep with nothing to pay to leave. Live in about a week. What that sits against across the rest of the market is in what a tradesman's website costs.