Buyer guide
Code ownership and project handoff
Marco Navarro describes a vendor reply he keeps seeing: the GitHub account is in the agency’s name, and handover is chargeable work. His line is the one to remember. A zip of the latest source is not a handover. You cannot see history, you cannot see who can push, and you cannot see the pipeline that turns that zip into the live site.
Written by SiteMivo. The first year of support is updates, fixes, and small features. We do not publish an uptime percentage. Drafted with research assistance.
Four doors, and any one of them can stop a one-line change
- The repository is in your organisation, with you as an owner, from the first commit. Not a zip on the last day.
- The domain registrar account is in your name, with the auth code you can produce. Passion In Design wrote up a recovery where WHOIS showed the old agency as registrant. Billing moved in a day. Full control took about four weeks, and the agency never sent the auth code. The client in that write-up is unnamed.
- The content is a file you can edit. Wix’s help page says the site has to stay on Wix servers. Squarespace’s export is a partial WordPress XML, not the design. A page builder that stores layout in its own database format will not give you a one-line copy change. It will give you a rewrite.
- The deploy note names the production project, the branch, the build command, the environment variables, the domains, and the redirects. If that lives in one developer’s head, a copy change waits until they answer.
The test is a stranger shipping one sentence
Someone who did not build the site should be able to change a sentence, deploy, and see it on the live URL, using the note. Third-party licences are listed. The CMS account, if there is one, is in your name. Hosting credentials are in your password manager, not in a shared inbox we control.
That is what process and engagements are for. Start a project if you want those accounts opened in your name before we write the first page.