What to check when commissioning a website: 12 points.
When you have a website built, the thing that deserves the most attention is not the design itself but what is written down and testable at handover: who will own the domain, the code and the content, by what criterion speed and accessibility will be accepted, and how search engines will read the site. Each of the twelve points below is tied to a question you can check without any technical knowledge.
In a website project, regret usually shows up not on launch day but months later: the domain renewal notice goes to someone else’s email, every text change requires opening a ticket, new pages do not appear in Google. Almost none of these problems has anything to do with design quality; every one of them stems from an item that was never written into the handover.
We use the list below ourselves in the pre-proposal meeting for corporate web design projects; but the list applies no matter who you hire. Under each point there is a “how to check” line: a question you can put to the provider or a check you can run in your own browser.
1. Whose name will the domain be registered in?
The domain is the title deed of the site. A domain registered in the provider’s own account, in the provider’s own name, becomes the hardest asset to recover once the relationship ends. The registrant should be your company; technical management rights can be given to someone else, ownership cannot.
- How to check → in the domain registrar’s panel, the “registrant” field should show your company’s legal name.
- How to check → the email address that receives the renewal notice should belong to your company.
2. Are the source code and content files handed over?
When the site goes live you should hold not just an address but the site itself: the code, the texts, the images and setup notes sufficient to rebuild them. A site tied to a locked panel or to a provider-specific system cannot be handed over to another team.
- How to check → look in the contract for the sentence “all source code and content files are transferred”; before handover, take a copy into your own account.
3. Who will update the content, and how?
An admin panel, editing files, or opening a request with the provider? All three are legitimate solutions; the problem is learning the answer after handover. The decision depends on how often the content changes and who changes it; the details are in the guide static site or content management system.
- How to check → at the proposal stage, ask for the workflow for changing a service text, written out step by step; before handover, have someone on your team try that workflow themselves.
4. By what criterion will speed be accepted?
“A fast site” is not an acceptance criterion. A criterion is a number, a measurement method and a measurement location. This site’s contract is a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) below 0.8 seconds for real users and a layout shift (CLS) of 0; the worst real-user LCP measured on 23 September 2026 was 420 milliseconds. Why should the method be written down? The same page scored 87 in Lighthouse’s default settings and 98 in a real Chrome configuration — the gap between the two numbers came from the measuring tool’s settings.
- How to check → does the proposal state a number, a tool and a measurement condition for speed; is the report of that measurement delivered at handover?
5. Is accessibility part of the deliverable?
Accessibility means the site can be used with a keyboard, with a screen reader and with low vision. The international standard is WCAG, and its levels are A, AA and AAA. On this site every release passes an automated accessibility audit before going live; a 2-pixel focus ring, touch targets of at least 44 pixels and the contrast ratio are guarded in the test suite. Accessibility added afterwards is both harder and less complete than accessibility built in from the start.
- How to check → navigate the site using only the Tab key: can you see at every moment which element you are on?
- How to check → does the proposal state the target level (A or AA) and the testing method?
6. How does the site work on a phone?
Looking right on a phone is not enough; it has to work: the form must be fillable, the menu must open, the page must not scroll sideways, buttons must be easy to press with a finger. None of this is visible in a presentation given on a desktop screen.
- How to check → open the test address on your own phone, fill in the contact form from start to finish and try scrolling the page sideways.
7. Does every page have a single address?
If the same page opens with and without www, over http and https, with and without a trailing slash, a search engine may see them as separate addresses. On 22 August 2026 Google knew 93 addresses for this site, while the site had 58 pages; the difference was exactly these spelling variants, and all of them were consolidated into a single address with permanent redirects. The preferred address is called the canonical address.
- How to check → open your home page typed with www, without www and with http; all three should arrive at the same single address.
8. What happens to the old site’s addresses?
If the new site replaces an old one, each of the old addresses must either be redirected to its new counterpart or deliberately retired. In September 2026, 70 addresses left out of the index in this site’s Search Console returned 404, and the samples tested were addresses left over from the domain’s previous site. One more lesson: checking redirects by looking only at the status code is not enough — our own check once counted a redirect that went to the wrong place as “passed”; since that day the destination address of every line is tested as well.
- How to check → at handover, ask for the list of old addresses and the new counterpart of each; open a few old addresses in the browser and see where you land.
9. How will search engines and AI read the page?
The human reader of a page sees the heading and the text; the machine reader reads the title tag, the description, the page hierarchy and the structured data. Errors in this layer are silent: on this site Search Console found a breadcrumb trail with an unnamed link and a profile page with a date lacking a time. Both were fixed, and the generator now stops the build when a breadcrumb trail has an unnamed link.
- How to check → after launch, ask whether the site has been added to Search Console and whether your company holds the access.
10. Who writes the texts, and how deep do they go?
A site that looks finished but is empty inside is weak for search engines and visitors alike. On 22 August 2026, 13 pages of this site had the status “Crawled – currently not indexed”; the diagnosis was thin content — that day none of the 58 pages exceeded 800 words. If the proposal does not make clear who will write the texts, more often than not nobody does.
- How to check → does the proposal include a “who prepares it” line for texts, images and translation?
11. Are the legal pages and personal data handling ready?
Every site with a form collects personal data; every site that uses cookies has to explain it. Which texts are required, and their official sources, are covered in the guide what a website must have. The information here is not legal advice; verify the current requirement with the official source.
- How to check → compare what the privacy notice says with what the site actually does: if the notice says “cookies are used”, which ones; if it says “none are used”, are there really none in the browser?
12. Who is responsible for maintenance after handover?
Domain renewal, the security certificate, software updates, backups and measurement: each of these is a line of responsibility. If there is no name next to the line, there is also nobody there when the problem first appears.
- How to check → for each maintenance item, ask for a written answer to the question “who, how often, and how do they notify you”.
How do you use this list at the proposal stage?
Use the twelve points not as a checklist but as a list of questions. If the answer to every point is written in the proposal, that is a good start; if it is not, the right time to ask is before signing. To read the proposal text itself, ten questions to ask about a proposal is written separately; which items make up the cost is covered in the guide what determines a website’s price.
If you want to see what each section of the site does, the guide what a corporate website should look like covers every section, from the home page to the legal pages, for both the human and the machine reader.
A good handover is one that can survive even after the provider is gone.
If you want to see these answers on your own site, corporate web design delivers design, code and technical SEO from one hand, on a measurable budget.