Cooperation with a previous vendor sometimes ends naturally and sometimes abruptly. Either way, the company is left with the same question: how do you hand the website over to a new team so that nothing disappears, nothing stops working and nothing turns out to be held hostage by one person?
We have taken over projects after agencies, freelancers and internal teams. Below is the process that works for us - and that you should expect from any solid vendor, in Poland or anywhere else.
Access first, opinions later
The first step is not judging your predecessors’ code. It is establishing who holds the keys:
- the domain and DNS panel (the single most important access - it controls both the website and email),
- hosting / server (panel, SSH, FTP),
- CMS and database,
- company email,
- analytics, Search Console, ad accounts,
- the code repository, if one exists.
If anything on this list cannot be established, that is not a formality - it is risk number one. A website nobody fully controls works fine only until the first outage.
Inventory, not a verdict
Only with access in hand can you answer what actually exists: which CMS version, which plugins, when the last update happened, whether backups exist and whether anyone has ever restored one, what is custom and what is standard.
At this stage, watch out for two extreme tones:
“Everything is badly written, it must be rebuilt from scratch” - this is usually the opening line of the most expensive possible engagement, not a diagnosis.
Equally risky is “everything works, let’s touch nothing”. A mature assessment almost always sounds less dramatic: some things should stay, some need updating, a few need fixing first.
A plan for the first 30 days
A good takeover has a simple structure:
- Stabilization - backups, security updates, uptime monitoring, cleaning up accounts and passwords (every access owned by the company, not by a private person).
- Risk list - what can stop working and what it would cost; from outdated PHP to a domain registered to a former employee.
- Business priorities - only now the growth conversation: what blocks sales, what annoys users, what is worth improving first.
This order has one more advantage: it separates the decision “who takes care of the project” from the decision “do we rebuild the website”. These are two different conversations and gluing them together rarely ends well.
What to expect from the new vendor
Whoever you end up working with, a few healthy standards:
- access stays yours - the vendor gets accounts, but the company owns the services,
- handover documentation - what exists, where, and who is responsible,
- no rebuild decisions in the first week,
- a clear incident-reporting path and realistic response times.
If you have a project you want to hand over calmly - this is how caring for existing projects works at Invisio. And if you would rather start by simply checking the state of things, begin with a free audit.