Website redesign / Handover
What Should a Website Redesign Handover Include?
Make sure your team can operate the redesigned website after launch and knows where to turn when something changes.
Agree on handover deliverables in the scope
Handover is easier when the contract or brief names the assets and knowledge the business needs. Define who owns the domain, hosting, CMS, analytics, design files, code repository, licenses, and third-party accounts. Record which items are transferred, which remain under a service agreement, and any recurring fees.
The domain and hosting ownership guide covers the access decisions that are easy to overlook before work starts.
Provide usable operating instructions
Editors need a short guide to changing common content, publishing safely, maintaining images, and checking forms or orders. Technical maintainers need deployment steps, environment variable names without exposed secrets, integration owners, backup and recovery procedures, and where to find logs.
Documentation should reflect the delivered site, not a generic platform manual. Demonstrate an actual edit and let the client's team perform one while the delivery team is still available to answer questions.
Close the launch with evidence
Deliver the final page and redirect inventory, agreed accessibility and performance checks, form or checkout test results, analytics verification, and known limitations. Identify outstanding work explicitly with an owner and target decision date. The prelaunch testing guide gives a practical list of journeys to verify.
Confirm that emergency contacts and recovery access work before the old site or account arrangement is retired. A live URL alone is not proof that the project is ready to operate.
Separate warranty from ongoing improvement
Define which defects the delivery team will fix after launch, for how long, and how they should be reported. Decide who handles security updates, content requests, monitoring, new features, and vendor renewals after that period.
Review the post-redesign support guide to choose a sensible operating model. Schedule a short review after real visitors and editors have used the site, so unresolved friction becomes a prioritized backlog.
Plan a site around real decisions
Need help with your project?
Northform can scope a redesign through launch and handover, with the access and operating guidance your team needs to keep the site useful.
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