Website Handover: The Checklist Before Your Final Payment

The final instalment is the moment you hold the most power. Before it, the developer fixes everything you point at. After it, you are a maintenance customer, often with a queue. So the handover must not be "looks nice, let's pay". The list below takes an hour and needs no technical skills. Copy it into an email, tick the items, and send the developer the ones that fail.

How do I check for myself that the site is really fast?

Do not take "optimised" on trust. Measure.

Open pagespeed.web.dev and enter the address of the new site. Look at the "Mobile" tab, not Desktop; Google ranks on the mobile measurement.
A Performance score above 90 is good work. Below 50 means the site will be unusable on a phone with mobile data. For comparison: this site scores 100 and loads in under half a second; check it right now.
LCP (largest contentful paint) under 2.5 s, Google's threshold. Anything above that Google marks red.

If the developer says the tool is inaccurate: Google uses the same tool for your ranking.

What do I check on a phone?

More than half of visits come from a phone. Test on yours, not the developer's.

Open every page on your phone on mobile data, not the office wifi. Text readable without zooming, buttons big enough for a finger, no horizontal scrolling.
Phone number and email are tappable. Tapping the number opens the dialler.

Do the forms work, and where does the message go?

A form that silently fails costs you customers without you knowing.

Send a test message through every form. It must arrive at your address, not the developer's. Check the spam folder too.
Ask who else receives a copy. After handover the answer must be: nobody but you.

Is the site secure and correctly reachable?

A padlock in the address bar on every page. Type the address with http:// and confirm it redirects to https:// on its own.
With and without www lead to the same page, with no error.
A wrong address (e.g. /something-that-does-not-exist) shows a proper 404 page with navigation, not a white page with code.

Did I lose my old links in the redesign?

If you had a previous site, this is the most common hidden damage. Google spent years collecting your old addresses; if they now lead nowhere, rankings drop.

Take five old addresses (from Google: search site:yourdomain.com) and open them. Each must redirect to the matching new page, not to the home page and not to a 404.
Google Search Console is set up on your Google account, not the developer's, and the sitemap is submitted. It is the only place where you will see whether Google reads the site at all.

Whose accounts are they, and who holds the keys?

This is the item most people skip, and the one that makes changing providers painful later.

The domain is registered to your company and the registrar login is yours. Check at your registrar (for .si domains, register.si).
The hosting account (with us, Cloudflare) is on your email address; the developer has at most collaborator access you can remove.
Business email is yours and the passwords are with you, not in the developer's notebook.
Source code and content are with you. With us, the code goes to your Google Drive together with editing instructions; it is part of the handover, not an extra. We describe how that looks on You own everything.

If any of these four get the answer "we will sort that out later", do not pay until it is sorted. Later means never.

Are the legal pages in place?

Privacy policy, company details (registered name, registered office, registration and tax number, VAT status) and, for shops, terms and conditions are published and linked from the footer. What exactly must be there is in a separate guide (in Slovenian).
Cookies: if the site uses no tracking cookies, it needs no banner. If it has one, the "reject" button must work.

What if items fail?

Send the developer the list of failed items with a deadline, usually five working days. A serious provider fixes them without debate; each one is standard work, not an extra service. If silence follows, or an invoice for "additional work", you have the guide on contracts and what to do when things go wrong.

The short list to copy:

WEBSITE HANDOVER
[ ] PageSpeed mobile above 90, LCP under 2.5 s
[ ] every page works on a phone, phone/email tappable
[ ] every form delivers a test message to MY address
[ ] https works, http and www redirect
[ ] 404 page is styled
[ ] 5 old addresses redirect to the right new pages
[ ] Search Console on MY account, sitemap submitted
[ ] domain registered to my company, registrar login mine
[ ] hosting/Cloudflare on my email address
[ ] business email and passwords with me
[ ] source code and content handed over (Drive/archive)
[ ] privacy policy + company details published
[ ] terms and conditions (shop)
[ ] cookie banner only if needed, and "reject" works

We run every site we hand over through this same list before issuing the final invoice; if you want a site that passes it on day one, write to us.