A Practical Website Handover Checklist
What to check before handing over a business website: content, mobile usability, contact routes, search basics, and maintenance ownership.
By Usman Asif Qureshi · Practical notes
Content and ownership
Confirm names, dates, services, contact details, and image permissions. Document who owns the domain, hosting, repository, and business accounts. Transfer access through the service’s access controls, not through passwords written in project documents.
Mobile and contact journeys
Check the main pages on a narrow screen and navigate them with a keyboard. Verify that important actions are easy to find. Test the contact form with an agreed test recipient, including its success and failure messages, and confirm actual receipt rather than relying only on a success screen.
Search and maintenance
Review page titles, canonical URLs, language alternatives, the sitemap, and unwanted indexing restrictions. Agree how content updates, backups, security updates, and delivery failures will be handled. Record a short release checklist that can be repeated after every significant change.