Sooner or later every agency ends a client relationship. Sometimes the client is moving to an in-house team or another provider. Sometimes the agency is narrowing its focus, or the work has stopped making sense on either side. Occasionally it is uncomfortable: unpaid invoices, constant scope arguments, a mismatch nobody can fix.
However it starts, the ending is the part the client remembers longest. A clean exit leaves the door open for referrals and future work. A messy one, with a site that breaks the week after you leave or a domain nobody can transfer, follows your agency around. This post is a practical guide to offboarding a WordPress client properly: the conversation, the inventory, the handover and the loose ends that usually get missed.
Start with what the contract says
Before any email goes out, read your agreement with the client. Look for notice periods, what happens to work in progress, who owns the code and design files, whether any licences or accounts are yours to keep, and what you agreed to hand over at the end. If the agreement is silent on some of this, note the gaps; you will need to settle them by agreement now and add them to your contract template for next time. Our post on what a maintenance agreement should include covers terms worth adding.
If money is owed, decide in advance how you will handle the handover in relation to it. Many agencies hand over what has been paid for and hold back what has not, but whatever you do, say so clearly and early. Holding a client’s live site or domain hostage is a fast way to turn a commercial dispute into a much bigger problem. If the situation is contentious, take proper legal advice; this post is general guidance, not legal advice.
Have the conversation, then confirm it in writing
Where you can, tell the client on a call rather than by email first. It is kinder, and it lets you answer the obvious questions straight away. Then follow up in writing so nobody’s memory is the record. A written note might read:
“Following our call today, this confirms that our support for yoursite.com will end on [date]. Until then, everything continues as normal. Before that date we will send you a full handover pack: a list of every account and where it is held, current backups, licence details and notes on how the site is set up. If you have a new provider, we are happy to talk to them directly to make the move smooth. Please let me know who should receive the handover.”
Notice what that does. It names an end date, reassures them that service continues until then, says what they will receive and offers to work with the next provider. It does not reopen the reasons.
Build an inventory of everything you touch
Most offboarding problems come from something nobody remembered. List every account and service connected to the client’s site, and for each one note who owns it, who pays for it and what needs to happen.
| Item | Questions to answer |
|---|---|
| Domain registration | Whose account is it in? Who pays the renewal? Does it need transferring? |
| DNS | Where is it managed? Will the records survive a move? |
| Hosting | Agency account or client account? Is a migration needed? |
| Is mail hosted with the site, or with a separate provider? | |
| Premium plugins and theme | Licensed to the agency or the client? Will updates stop? |
| Third-party services | Forms, payment gateways, analytics, tag manager, CDN, backups, uptime monitoring |
| Code and files | Repositories, design files, custom plugins, original images and fonts |
| Users and access | Every login held by your team, contractors and partners |
The domain and hosting rows are where most of the tension sits. If your agency has been holding these on the client’s behalf, the handover is a chance to put them in the client’s own name. We discuss the trade-offs of each arrangement in agency-managed versus client-owned hosting and domains.
Licences need their own plan
Premium plugins and themes bought on your agency’s account usually cannot simply be handed to the client. Depending on the vendor, the site may keep working on the installed version but stop receiving updates once your licence key is removed, which becomes a security issue over time. Tell the client which products are involved and that they or their new provider will need their own licences, and give them enough notice to buy them. If you track licences carefully across clients, this step takes minutes; if not, it is the moment you find out why it is worth doing. The approach in managing premium licences across many client sites helps here.
Put together the handover pack
The pack is what you send to the client or their new provider. It should let a competent developer pick up the site without calling you. Include:
- The account inventory above, with owners and renewal dates.
- A recent full backup of files and database, plus where earlier backups are stored and when they will be deleted.
- Theme and plugin list, with notes on anything customised, and which plugins must not be updated without care.
- Any custom code, with a short explanation of what each piece does.
- Known issues and anything you were planning to fix next.
- How scheduled tasks, forms and email are set up, and where notifications go.
- A record of recent changes, so the next team can trace any problem that appears after the move.
If you handed the site over at launch with a document like this, update that rather than starting from scratch. Our checklist for handing over a finished site covers the launch version; the offboarding pack is the same idea with the history added.
Moving the site, if it needs moving
If the site sits on your agency’s hosting, it will need to move. Agree the date with the client and the new provider, and avoid busy periods for the client’s business. For a store, pick a quiet time and plan for orders placed during the move. Check forms, payments and email after the move, not only the home page. Keep your copy of the site running until the client confirms the new one is working, then remove it on a date you have told them about.
Domain transfers have their own steps: removing the registrar lock on the domain, sending an authorisation code and confirming the transfer by email. Registrars may also block a transfer for a while after a recent registration or change of owner details, so start early rather than in the last week.
Remove access, including your partners’
Once the client has confirmed they have everything, remove your access. Every WordPress user your team created, every hosting and registrar login, every connected tool. If you used an outsourcing partner on this client, ask them to confirm in writing that they have removed theirs as well, and check that they have deleted any local copies of the site and customer data they held. Our post on handling client data with a remote partner covers what to agree about this in general terms.
Then send the client a short note listing what has been removed. It protects you if something goes wrong on the site later, and it shows the client you took their security seriously to the end.
Agree what happens after the end date
Clients often come back with a question a week or a month after you part ways: where a setting lives, why a form stopped, what a plugin was for. Decide in advance how you will handle that, and tell them. Some agencies offer a short window in which they will answer handover questions by email, and treat anything after that, or anything that needs hands-on work, as new paid work. Others prefer a complete break. Either is fine if it is stated.
Write it into the confirmation email so there is no awkwardness later. Something like: “For two weeks after the end date we are happy to answer questions about the handover by email. After that, or for any work on the site itself, we would treat it as a new request and quote it.” Adjust the period to whatever you can honestly offer, and keep to it.
Close the paperwork
- Send the final invoice with a clear list of what it covers.
- Cancel any recurring charges you were passing on, such as hosting or licences, from the right date.
- Archive the client’s tickets and notes where you can find them if the client ever comes back.
- Update your own records so renewals and reminders for this client stop.
If the client is leaving you
When the decision is the client’s, the same steps apply, and so does the tone. Ask once, politely, whether there is anything you could have done differently, and take the answer as useful rather than personal. Then make the handover as easy for the next provider as you would want it to be for you. From the client’s point of view, the process looks much like the one we describe in changing website maintenance provider, so it can help to read it from their side.
Learn from it
Every exit shows you something about your process. Accounts you could not find, licences in the wrong name, missing notes. Fix those for the clients you still have. A clean offboarding is also part of running a healthy outsourced operation, which we cover in our guide to outsourcing WordPress work for agencies.
If the hardest part of an exit is moving the site to the client’s own hosting, our site migration help for agencies can handle the move while you keep the conversation with the client.
Next in this series: WooCommerce Client Sites: The Extra Risks for Agencies
