The good news is that moving agencies is usually far less dramatic than it feels. We take over WordPress websites from other developers all the time, and the smooth handovers all have one thing in common: the client had the keys before anyone started packing.
This guide walks you through the seven steps in the order we’d do them, plus the warning signs that it really is time to move.
Red flags that it’s time to change website developer
Every agency has the odd slow week. That’s not a reason to leave. These are the patterns we hear about most from people who get in touch with us:
- Radio silence. Support requests sit for days, or you have to chase every single time.
- You don’t have your own logins. You can’t update a page, see your analytics or check your hosting without asking them.
- Mystery invoices. You’re paying for hosting, “maintenance” or licences and nobody can tell you exactly what they cover.
- Your site feels stuck. WordPress, plugins and PHP haven’t been updated in months, and the site is getting slower.
- They’ve outgrown you, or you’ve outgrown them. Your needs have changed and their answer is always “that’ll need a rebuild”.
If a few of those sound familiar, it’s also worth reading our 14 signs you need a new website. Sometimes the problem is the supplier, sometimes it’s the site itself, and sometimes it’s both.
Before you switch web design agency: check what you actually own
Here’s the golden rule. Don’t hand in your notice until you have access to everything.
Most agencies are perfectly professional about handovers, but you’re in a much stronger position if you’re not relying on their goodwill.
Step 1: Find out who owns your domain name
Your domain is the most important thing to secure. If you lose control of it, you lose your website address and usually your email too.
For a .co.uk or .uk address, run a search on the Nominet WHOIS lookup. It shows the registrar that manages the domain, its tag, the renewal date and the name servers. Nominet notes that the registrant’s name and address are only shown if the registrant has consented, so you may need to ask your agency or registrar directly whose name is on it.
Ideally the registrant should be your business, not the agency or a former employee. If it isn’t, ask for it to be changed now while relationships are friendly.
Moving a .uk domain between registrars is simple. Your current provider changes the domain’s tag to your new registrar’s tag. Hosting company 20i explains the IPS tag transfer process clearly, and it’s worth knowing that tag changes are often actioned straight away.
Step 2: Get admin access to your hosting and WordPress
Ask for your own administrator account in WordPress. Not a shared login, and not an “editor” account. You want full admin rights under your own email address.
Do the same for hosting. If your site sits on the agency’s own server, you won’t get a control panel login, and that’s normal. In that case the plan is simply to move the site to new hosting, which a good new agency will do for you. Our WordPress support and hosting service covers exactly this kind of move.
Moving WordPress is well trodden ground. According to W3Techs, WordPress runs 40.2% of all websites and 58.7% of sites with a known CMS, so almost any competent developer can pick it up. You’re not locked in unless someone has built something very unusual.
Step 3: Don’t forget your email
This is the one that catches people out. If your email runs through the same hosting package as your website, cancelling the hosting can switch off your inbox.
Find out where your email actually lives. It might be Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or a mailbox on the web host. Then note the DNS records that make it work (the MX, SPF and DKIM records).
Whoever manages your DNS after the move needs to keep these exactly as they are.
Step 4: Take control of Google Analytics and Search Console
Your analytics history is years of useful data, and it belongs to your business. Ask to be made an Administrator on your Google Analytics property. Google’s help page on adding Analytics users shows where this lives under Admin and Access Management.
For Search Console, you want to be an owner. Google’s guide to managing owners, users and permissions makes a useful point: when you remove a former verified owner, you should also remove their verification token, or they can re-verify later. Your new agency can tidy this up once you’ve moved.
While you’re at it, list any other accounts linked to the site. Think Google Business Profile, Google Ads, Meta, Mailchimp, payment gateways and cookie consent tools.
Step 5: Take a full backup and list your licences
Before anyone touches anything, get a complete backup of the website files and the database. Ask your current agency for one and ideally take your own too.
Then make a simple list of paid themes and plugins. Some agencies use their own developer licences, which stop working once you leave. That’s not a disaster, but you’ll want to budget for your own licences so updates keep coming through.
If you’ve recently inherited the website as a new marketing manager, our new marketing manager audit is a handy companion to this checklist.
Will I lose my Google rankings if I switch web design agency?
Not if the move is handled carefully. Changing who looks after your website doesn’t affect your rankings at all by itself. Google doesn’t know or care which agency you use.
Rankings are only at risk when something changes on the site: the page addresses (URLs), the content, the domain, or the speed and structure of the site. So the key question is whether you’re keeping the same site on new hosting, or redesigning at the same time.
Step 6: Map your URLs and set up 301 redirects
If any page addresses are going to change, you need a redirect map. It’s just a spreadsheet with every old URL in one column and its new home in the next.
Google’s own guide to site moves recommends pulling old URLs from your sitemap, analytics and content management system, then using server side permanent redirects. Its advice is to keep redirects “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”.
Permanent redirects matter because, as Google explains in its page on redirects and Google Search, they tell Google the new page should be treated as the main version. That’s how your old pages pass their value to the new ones.
Be realistic about timings too. Google says you may see ranking fluctuations while it recrawls, and that a small to medium sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move. A little wobble is normal. A steep, lasting drop usually means redirects are missing.
If you’re planning a redesign as part of the move, have a look at our 10 avoidable website redesign mistakes and our practical SEO tips to improve rankings.
Step 7: Plan the handover and timing
Once you have your access sorted, check your contract for notice periods and any outstanding fees. Then agree a switch over date with your new agency.
A few practical tips:
- Avoid your busiest weeks. Don’t move an ecommerce site the week before Black Friday, or a school website during admissions.
- Keep the old hosting live for a while. Don’t cancel it until the new site is confirmed working, email included.
- Test everything after the move. Forms, checkout, bookings, email delivery and tracking codes.
- Keep it polite. A friendly exit gets you a faster handover. You may also need them to answer a question or two afterwards.
Earlier this year, the owner of a small ecommerce website got in touch with us. They’d become frustrated with their existing web design agency. Hosting costs were high, maintenance fees kept adding up, and simple support requests could take days to get a reply. For a business that relies on its website to sell, that combination was becoming hard to justify.
Our first step was a full audit of their WooCommerce website. We went through every plugin, checked which ones needed paid licences and who held them, and recorded everything else we’d need for a clean handover. With that in place we proposed a migration plan, moving the site to our own server out of hours so trading wasn’t interrupted. Because we could send the outgoing agency one clear list of everything we needed, the handover was far smoother than these things usually are, with very little back and forth.
The business now has cheaper, faster hosting and a support team that responds when they need it. With the foundations sorted, we’re hoping to help them grow further with search engine optimisation over the coming months.
What a good new agency should do for you
When you’re choosing who to move to, look for an agency that asks about your domain, email and analytics before they talk about design. That’s a sign they’ve done this before.
A good partner will audit the site, handle the technical move, set up redirects if needed and give you your own logins from day one. They should also explain things in plain English and give you a clear written scope. Our guide on how to write a web design brief will help you get quotes you can actually compare.
You can see how we approach projects on our web design process page, and what clients say about working with us on our reviews page
Thinking about moving? Let’s have a chat
Stuck with an unresponsive developer? We’re a small, friendly WordPress agency in Poole, Dorset, and we handle handovers for businesses, schools and online shops across the UK. We’ll check what you own, sort out access and move your site carefully so your customers never notice.
Further reading
- Google Search Central: Site moves and migrations
- Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search
- Nominet: .uk domain lookup (WHOIS)
- Search Console Help: Managing owners, users and permissions
- 20i: What is your Nominet (IPS) tag?
