Working out how to change website maintenance provider is mostly an access problem. You have decided to move. Maybe the reports stopped arriving, maybe nothing gets done unless you chase it, maybe the price stopped matching the work. Changing website maintenance provider is usually straightforward, and it goes wrong in one specific way: the accounts turn out not to be in your name.
Sort that out before you give notice, not after.
Before you say anything
None of this is hostile. It is the same list you would want on any handover, and doing it while the relationship is still normal is far easier than doing it afterwards.
- Log in to your domain registrar and confirm the domain is registered to you or your company, with your email as the contact. This is the one that matters most.
- Log in to your hosting account and check the same. An account in a provider’s name is a problem you want to discover now.
- Confirm you have a WordPress administrator account of your own, with your own email address.
- Download a full backup yourself and keep it somewhere the provider cannot reach.
- Save the last twelve months of reports if you have them. They are the maintenance history for whoever takes over.
If any of these are not in your name, ask for them to be transferred as a normal administrative request before you mention leaving. Most providers do this without fuss. The ones who do not have just told you something useful.
Give notice properly
Check the notice period in whatever you agreed. Thirty days is common; ours is seven. Give it in writing, state the last date you expect the service to cover, and ask for three specific things in the same message: a final backup, confirmation of what is included in the last month, and a list of any accounts or licences held in their name.
Keep the tone ordinary. You may need this person’s cooperation for a fortnight, and there is rarely anything to gain from making a handover awkward.
What to check on the way out
Licences. Premium themes and plugins are often bought on the provider’s licence. When they leave, those stop receiving updates — the site keeps working and quietly stops being patched. Ask which licences are theirs and budget for replacing them.
Anything hosted outside your site. Some providers run monitoring, backups or a form service from their own accounts. When the relationship ends, those stop, and it is easy not to notice until you need one.
Custom code. If work was written specifically for you, ask for it. A functionality plugin or a child theme is straightforward to hand over. Code written directly into a parent theme is not, and you want to know which you have.
Where the DNS is managed. Not always the registrar and not always the host. Getting this wrong is how email breaks during a move.
The first fortnight with the new provider
Do not schedule the switch for a week when the site matters most. Avoid a product launch, a campaign, or the run-up to a busy season.
Ask the new provider to do three things before touching anything: take their own backup, record what state they found the site in, and confirm they can restore what they took. That last one is worth insisting on — a handover is exactly when an untested backup gets discovered, and a restore that fails at that moment is a bad start for everyone.
Then expect a heavier first month. Sites that are being moved are often sites that were not being looked after, so there is usually a backlog of updates. That is normal, and a provider who says the first month is bigger than the rest is being straight with you.
When staying is the better answer
Not every complaint justifies the decision to switch website maintenance company, and switching has real costs — a handover period, a new provider learning the site, and a month or two before anyone knows what normal looks like for you.
Worth raising before leaving: reports that stopped arriving, a response time that has slipped, or a price that no longer matches the work. Say specifically what you want to change and give a date. A provider who has simply drifted will often fix it, and that is cheaper for you than a move.
Worth leaving over: accounts they will not put in your name, work that is repeatedly not done, a site that keeps breaking in the same way, or an unwillingness to say what was done last month. Those are not drift. They are how the arrangement works.
Make it permanent this time
Whatever prompted the move, the fix is the same: the accounts stay in your name, the reports arrive monthly, and the notice period is short enough that leaving is easy. Our note on what belongs in a website maintenance contract covers the terms worth agreeing at the start, and our own maintenance plans are built on exactly those terms because this conversation is a common one.