Website handover checklist: What to check before you sign off

A website handover is the point where your agency delivers the finished site, and you accept it. In most contracts, signing off closes the build phase and starts the warranty or support period, so anything you spot afterwards may be treated as a change request rather than a fix. That is why the hour you spend checking is worth more than any hour you spend chasing later.

This checklist is written for owners of service businesses, not developers. You do not need technical knowledge. You need a laptop, your phone, and a systematic run through the eight areas below. Last checked: 11 August 2026.

1. Design and brand consistency

Start with the whole picture before you click anything. Compare the live site against the design you approved. Are the brand colours exact rather than approximately right? Are headings, body text and buttons using the same typefaces throughout, at sizes you can read comfortably? Are photos sharp rather than stretched or compressed?

Then check the pages nobody demos. Homepages get polished; blog posts, service pages, the 404 page and form confirmation screens often do not. Click your logo from a deep page and confirm it returns you to the homepage. Consistency across every template is what makes a site look expensive.

2. Content and contact details

Read every page properly, out loud if you can. Look for placeholder text, duplicated paragraphs and half-finished sentences left over from the build. These are common, and they are embarrassing in front of a client.

Check the details that cost you money if they are wrong: company name, address, NIP or company number, phone number, email address, opening hours and the map location. If your site is bilingual, check both language versions with equal care, and confirm the language switch keeps the visitor on the same page rather than dumping them on the homepage.

3. Functionality: links, forms and CTAs

Now start clicking. Work through every navigation item, every dropdown and every button, and confirm nothing lands on a 404 page. Check footer links to the privacy policy and terms.

Forms matter most, because they are where enquiries come from. Submit a real test enquiry. Confirm three things: the visitor sees a clear confirmation, the message reaches your inbox rather than spam, and required fields are validated properly. If you use a booking tool or calculator, test it end-to-end. Also ask what spam protection is in place, because an unprotected form fills up fast.

4. Mobile and accessibility

Most of your visitors will arrive on a phone, so test on a real device rather than a browser preview. Check that text is readable without zooming, that images stay inside the screen, that the menu opens and closes cleanly, and that buttons are large enough to hit with a thumb. Fill in the contact form on your phone as well.

While you are there, do a basic accessibility pass. Can you navigate the main menu with the keyboard alone? Do images have alt text? Is there enough contrast between text and background? Accessibility is increasingly a legal expectation in the EU as well as good practice, so it is worth raising at handover rather than a year later.

5. Speed and Core Web Vitals

A slow site loses enquiries before anyone reads a word. Run your homepage and one service page through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the field and lab results together. Google documents the thresholds it uses in its Core Web Vitals guidance.

If the numbers are poor, the usual causes are oversized images, too many fonts, and heavy third-party scripts such as chat widgets and tracking tags. Ask your agency what the scores are and what is causing any drag. Framer and Webflow both produce fast sites by default, so weak results usually point to something added on top rather than the platform itself.

6. SEO and AEO basics

You do not need to audit anything technical. You need to confirm the foundations exist. Every important page should have its own meta title and meta description, written for that page rather than duplicated across the site. Google explains how it uses these in its documentation on titles and snippets. Each page should have one H1 and a sensible heading structure underneath it.

Ask whether the site is indexable, whether an XML sitemap has been submitted to Google Search Console, and, if this is a rebuild, whether every old URL redirects to its new equivalent. Missing redirects are the single most damaging handover mistake.

For answer engines, ask whether structured data has been added where relevant, such as organisation, service, article and FAQ markup. Nobody can promise you rich results or AI citations, but pages that are clearly structured and answer questions directly give you a far better chance.

7. Cookies, privacy and GDPR

If your site uses analytics, advertising pixels or embedded content, it almost certainly sets cookies that require consent. A banner that only informs visitors is not the same as one that asks for consent and lets them refuse or manage it. The European Data Protection Board's guidance on consent sets out what valid consent looks like.

Check that a privacy policy is linked and accessible, that it reflects the tools your site actually uses, and that analytics and marketing scripts only load after consent is given. What applies to you depends on your sector, your tools and your national implementation, so treat this as a list of things to verify with a qualified adviser rather than a compliance verdict.

8. Access, ownership and what happens next

This is the section most owners skip, and the one that causes the most pain later. You should leave the handover holding the keys to everything.

Also confirm the practical terms: the warranty period for fixing defects, what counts as a fix versus a paid change, response times for support, whether backups exist, and when your training session happens. Framer and Webflow are both straightforward to edit once shown, so ask for a walkthrough of the tasks you will actually do, such as editing CMS content in Framer or in Webflow.

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