How to fire your web designer

The short answer: secure the assets first, tell them second. Get into your domain registrar, your hosting, your analytics and your email before you send the message ending the relationship — not because most designers behave badly, but because the ones who do, do it in the fortnight after being told. We are Freedom35 Web Design, and we have an obvious interest here, so treat the checklist as the useful part and the sales pitch as optional.

Step 1 — find out what you actually control

Before anything else, work out which of these are in your name, in an account you can log into today:

• The domain. Look it up at lookup.icann.org and note the registrar. Then try logging in. Owning the domain and being able to reach the account are two different things — the full walkthrough is on who should own your domain.
• The hosting. Whose account is the site sitting in, and is it paid on your card or theirs?
• The DNS. Often somewhere else entirely from both. Whoever controls DNS controls where your email goes, which is the part that hurts.
• Business email. If your mail runs on the domain, this is the highest-stakes item on the list and the one people forget until it stops.
• Analytics, search console, ad accounts, the logo files. Lower stakes, easily lost, annoying to rebuild.

Step 2 — read what you signed

Look for three things specifically: the notice period, what happens to the site's files when you leave, and whether anything auto-renews on a date. A contract with a 30-day notice and an annual renewal in eleven days is a different conversation from one with neither.

If there is no contract at all — common with a one-person designer — then nothing obliges them to hand anything over quickly, and nothing obliges you to keep paying. That cuts both ways.

Step 3 — take copies while everything still works

Do this while the relationship is still cordial. It is far easier to ask for a file than to demand one.

• Save every page's text somewhere you own. Copy and paste is fine.
• Collect the original images — the full-size ones, not the versions squeezed for the web.
• Export your form submissions, customer list, or bookings, if the site holds any.
• Photograph or export anything you would miss: testimonials, a menu, a price list, years of posts.
• Note your current search rankings and traffic, so you can tell later whether the move cost you anything.

Step 4 — move the domain into your own account

This is the step that decides how the rest goes. If the domain is already yours, log in, turn on two-factor, and check the renewal card is yours. If it is in the designer's account, ask for a transfer — politely, in writing, before you end anything:

Hi [name] — before we go further with the site, I'd like to get the domain into our own registrar account for our records. Could you send the authorisation code and unlock the transfer when you get a minute? Happy to cover any fee.

A transfer needs an authorisation code (an EPP or auth code) and the domain unlocked. It normally completes in about five days. There is a 60-day lock after a domain is first registered or transferred, which is a real technical restriction and not an excuse if it applies.

Step 5 — then send the message

Short, factual, no grievance list. You are ending a commercial arrangement, not winning an argument:

Hi [name] — thanks for your work on the site. We've decided to move our website elsewhere, effective [date]. Could you confirm the final invoice, and send over the site files, image originals and any account logins still on your side? I'd like to keep this straightforward and I'm happy to pay for the handover time.

Offering to pay for the handover is not weakness. An hour of somebody's time is cheaper than a month of silence.

If they stop replying

It happens, and it is rarely malice — usually it is a solo designer who has quietly stopped working and is embarrassed. Either way:

• The domain is recoverable even without them. If it is registered in your name, the registrar can help you regain access to the account with proof of identity. Start there, not with the designer.
• A domain in their name is the hard case. ICANN has a transfer dispute process, and registrars have their own. It is slow. This is the reason step 4 comes before step 5.
• Stop the payments, but not before the domain is safe — a lapsed renewal on a domain you don't control is how people lose a name permanently.
• Rebuild rather than fight, if the site is small. Five pages of your own words are a week's work to reproduce. Six months of legal argument is not worth it.

Before you fire anyone, ask one question

Is the problem the designer, or the arrangement? A designer who is slow to answer because they build sites at night alongside a day job is not going to be fixed by a firmer email. That is the arrangement doing what it always did.

The version of this that keeps happening: a site was built two or three years ago, the person who built it has moved on, nobody has updated it since, and it is nobody's fault exactly. What you want next is not necessarily a better designer — it is a clear answer to "who changes this when I need it changed, and what does that cost?"

What we do instead

Every client of ours buys their own domain, in their own name, at their own registrar, before anything is built. We never hold it, which means this entire page is a non-event if you ever leave us: you already have the only thing that is genuinely hard to get back. Updates are pooled into an annual plan from $180 a year so there is a published answer to "what does a change cost". And we build the site free first, so you are never paying for something you have not seen — how it works sets that out, and the catch says what we get out of it.

The handover checklist

• Domain in your name, in your registrar account, with your card
• DNS access confirmed — and your email still arriving
• Site files and image originals in your possession
• Content and customer data exported
• Analytics and search console ownership transferred to you
• Final invoice agreed and paid
• Any recurring payment to the old designer cancelled — last, not first