What Happens When a Client Leaves
A client leaving should take an afternoon. On most platforms it takes a rebuild, and the client usually decides that was your fault. Here is how to make the exit clean, and why saying so in a proposal wins work.
Every client relationship ends. They sell the business, their nephew learns web design, they move to an agency with a nicer office. It is not a failure, it is a Tuesday.
What decides your reputation is the next hour. Either you hand over a website, or you explain why handing over a website is complicated.
What a clean handoff looks like
You send a folder and a login. The client, or whoever they hired, puts the folder on ordinary hosting. The site works.
That is the whole event. No export tool, no mapping exercise, no quote for a migration, no conversation where you sound defensive about a decision you made three years ago.
It is possible when the site was files all along. It is not really possible when the site was a page assembled by a platform at the moment somebody visited.
The three awkward versions
Most shops will recognise at least one of these.
The export that is not a site
You press the export button and get a folder. It contains pages and images and looks reassuring. Then somebody tries to put it on a server and discovers the content system is missing, the forms do nothing and the store is not there.
The export was real. It was just a head start on a rebuild rather than a move, and nobody said so until the folder was already open.
The site inside your account
Your client sites live in your platform account. That is convenient for managing twenty of them and uncomfortable the day one wants out, because the only way to give them the site is to give somebody access to an account containing nineteen other businesses.
The usual answer is a site transfer, if the platform offers one, which depends on the receiving party having their own paid account first. You are now negotiating somebody else's purchase on the way out of a relationship.
The automation nobody can untangle
This is the worst version and it is getting more common. The website is simple. What sits around it is not.
Follow up messages, booking flows, review requests and lead routing, all built in a resold platform under your brand. The client does not want the website back, they want their business processes back, and those were never a file anybody could hand over.
Why this is a sales argument, not a weakness
Here is the part shops get backwards. They treat portability as something to keep quiet about, in case the client gets ideas.
Try the opposite. Put it in the proposal, near the front.
Something like this. Your website will be ordinary files on hosting you control. If you ever want to work with somebody else, we will hand you the whole thing in an afternoon at no cost.
Every business owner reading that has been trapped by a supplier before. A plumber, an accountant, a previous web person. The sentence does two things at once. It removes a fear they were not going to mention, and it tells them you expect to keep them on merit.
Confidence sells. A shop that needs a technical trap to retain clients is telling you something about the work.
A handoff checklist worth keeping
Four things, prepared once, reused on every client.
- The site itself. Files, in a folder, with a short note saying what kind of hosting runs it.
- The accounts they should own. Domain and hosting registered in the client name from day one, not yours. This is the one most shops get wrong at the start and cannot fix at the end.
- The content, separately. Their words and images, readable without any software of yours. On a flat-file system this is the same folder, which is part of the appeal.
- A one page summary. What the site is, how it is updated and what was in progress. Half a page is plenty, and it is the thing that makes the next person speak well of you.
Prepare that bundle for every client at launch rather than at departure. It takes twenty minutes while you still remember everything, and it turns an awkward ending into a professional one.
What to check before your next client signs
Open whatever you build on and find the answer to one question. If I stop paying next month, does a working site still exist?
Not the design. Not an export. A website people can visit.
The platform directory records that answer for thirteen options in the same words, so you can compare without translating marketing language. Our own record is in there with the same four fields and the same honesty, including the places it is weakest.
Related reading on this site: what you own breaks the licence line down field by field, and the glossary entries for client handoff and code export cover the vocabulary.