The list to demand on the last day

Launch day is a bad time to discover the accounts. The registrant contact on the domain, the GitHub organisation, the Cloudflare or hosting account, the Search Console property, the analytics property if you have one: each of those should already be in your name, with a second person from your side as owner. A studio login that ‘we’ll transfer later’ is how the later never arrives.

Google’s canonicalisation guide is the search half of the same list. One hostname. HTTPS. A preferred host in redirects, not a coin toss between www and the apex. Search Console verified on the property you actually want indexed, by DNS, so the verification survives a redesign. Submit the sitemap that lists the URLs you intend to keep. A lastmod that changes every deploy, whether or not the page changed, trains Google to ignore the field.

Write down the boring operations. How a sentence is edited. How a redirect is added. Which environment variables exist and where they live, without pasting the secrets into the note. How to roll back. Who pays the registrar in month thirteen. A handover that only a developer can follow is a handover you will pay for twice.

Third-party licences belong on the same page. The font, the icon set, the chart library, the error tracker. If a licence is in the studio’s name, you do not own the right to keep using it when the contract ends. Open-source is not ‘free to forget’. It is a file you can read and an obligation you can name.

We open those accounts in your name before the first page, and the last day is a check against the list, not a negotiation. If a vendor tells you the organisation is theirs and the export is extra, you already know how that ends.