What to check before you pay for a finished website
The last payment is the only leverage you will ever have. Spend an hour before you send it.
The short answer
Before paying the balance: log into the domain, hosting and website yourself, test every form and button from a phone on mobile data, check the site is not blocking Google, and get the handover in writing.
Accounts first
Log in yourself, in front of the developer if possible, to three places: the domain registrar, the hosting account, and the website admin. Not screenshots of them. Actually log in.
Check that the domain is in your name with your email on it, and that auto-renew is on. Check the hosting account is in your name and you know the renewal date. Check your website account is an administrator, not an editor.
Ask for the Google accounts too: the Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should be owned by your email address, with the developer added as a user. Owner and user are different things, and the difference only matters on the day you part ways.
Test it like a customer, not like an owner
Take a phone that is not yours, switch off wifi, and open the site. Read the home page. Time how long it takes. Then do what a customer would do.
Submit every form and confirm each one arrives in the correct inbox, and not in spam. Tap the WhatsApp button and check it opens a chat with the right number. Tap the phone number and check it dials. Send yourself a test order if there is a shop, and pay it with real money, then refund it.
Open five pages at random and look for text left over from the template: someone else's business name, Latin filler, "Lorem ipsum", or a stock photo where your team should be.
The technical checks you can do without being technical
Check the padlock appears on every page, not only the home page.
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing appears and the site has been live for more than a couple of weeks, ask why. The usual cause is the "discourage search engines" setting left switched on, which is a two second fix and a very expensive thing to leave.
Open yourdomain.com/wp-sitemap.xml and see that your pages are listed. Ask whether Search Console is verified and the sitemap submitted.
Run the home page through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile number. If it is poor, ask what it would take to improve it, and get the answer before you pay rather than after.
What you should receive, in writing
A list of every account and login. What is included in the price and what will cost extra later. How long faults are fixed for free. What a small change costs after that period. Whether backups are being taken, by whom, and where they are kept.
A short training session, recorded on your phone, showing how to edit text, change a price, add a page and upload a photo. Fifteen minutes of video will save you from paying somebody to change a phone number for the next three years.
And a clear answer on who owns the work. Once the final payment is made, the site, the content and the accounts should be yours, with no licence to renew and nothing held back.
Fair to both sides
Being careful is not the same as being difficult. Make your list once, share it early, and check it in one sitting rather than sending twenty messages over three weeks.
Separate faults from new ideas. Something that does not work as agreed is a fault and should be fixed before payment. Something you thought of afterwards is new work and should be quoted. Mixing the two is how good projects turn sour at the end.
And when it is all done, pay promptly. The developer you can call next year is the one who was treated well this year.
Questions people ask
What if I find problems after I have already paid?
Ask for them to be fixed under whatever warranty was agreed, and most developers will. If nothing was agreed, you are relying on goodwill, which is exactly why the written scope matters at the start. Keep the messages calm and specific: "the contact form does not deliver to our inbox" gets fixed faster than "the site is not working". Pay attention to the difference between a fault and a change, because the second one you will need to pay for.
The developer wants full payment before handing over the logins. Is that normal?
Holding the final files until the final payment is reasonable. Holding your domain, your hosting or your Google Business Profile is not, because those should have been in your name from the first day. That is the difference. Pay for work, but do not accept a situation where paying is the only way to get access to accounts that were always yours.
How long should the free fixes period be?
Thirty days is common for a small site, and sixty or ninety on bigger projects. It should cover things not working as agreed, not new features. Ask what happens after it ends and what small changes cost, so there is no argument the first time you need a price changed.
Do I need to understand the technical parts to check any of this?
No. Everything on this list is something you can do with a phone and a browser: log in, submit a form, tap a button, search one thing on Google, run one speed test. If a developer tells you these checks are unnecessary or too technical for you, that itself is useful information about how the rest of the relationship will go.
Read next
Choosing a web developer
Most bad website projects here could have been avoided, and the avoiding happens in the first conversation.
Read moreKeeping your site online and safe
Nobody targets a hardware shop in Ndeeba by name. The attacks are automatic, they scan everything, and they find whatever was left unlocked.
Read moreWhat your trade needs
We have written a page for every kind of business we build for, with what each one needs on a website.
See the tradesWant to talk it through before you decide anything?
Send one WhatsApp message saying what your business does. We will tell you honestly whether a website would help you, what it would cost and how long it would take. No charge for the conversation.