In our last blog here we talked about the need to be in control of your website, and how you know whether you’re in control or not.
Now we want to talk about how, if you are not in control, how do you wrestle it back from the agency. Let’s say a word about agencies first. Most of them are fine upstanding organisations who are open and upfront about their services. In effect you’ve outsourced your website to them and there is an element of lost control therein.
But those agencies who are not so transparent and bill you for strange, unexplained services, they are the ones we think need to be weeded out, and more importantly you need to be free from.
Step 1 is simple. Do a couple of things. The first is to search the who.is database with your domain name. You’ll get something like this in return:
In the olden days you used to get more information, but at least it’s a start. I registered my domain name back in 2013 with Ionos, it’s up to date and will need to be updated next year – all good.
The second thing to do is add a little Extension to your web browser, called ‘Built With’. I almost exclusively use the Chrome browser and it’s very simple. Click on the three vertical dots, click settings then extensions then type ‘built’ and built with will show up. You may need to activate, but follow the instructions and you’ll see a ‘bw’ in the ribbon on the right. You can now go to your website, or any website for that matter and click the button and it will give you screeds of information. You want to know the CMS, plugins – there will be many, most of them don’t matter, but you now have information, which you didn’t have before.
The third thing to do is to take screen shots of your current website, plus if you have the original designs and details of your colour scheme
Step 2 – Write or email to your web company. Tell them you want to take back control of all elements of the website – the domain and the hosting in particular. You don’t need to give reasons, but if you want to then you can tell them that you want to change to your preferred hosting, plus you want to be in control of the domain and you want to create others.
Step 3 is to wait for the almost comical response of the agency – the wringing of the hands, the outrage that you should want to do this. What have they done to upset you that you would want to leave the fold? They’ll ask if you know what you’re doing, and this is very dangerous and that your website will lose all it’s SEO that’s been built over the years. This is all bluster because, understandably, they don’t want to lose your business.
When you eventually get them to agree you will be faced with a rather large task – which is to convert the existing website over to the new hosting. This frankly is not trivial, unless your current website is built with WordPress, then it’s a fairly easy job, because there are tools that have been built to do this.
However, our advice is simple – don’t transfer the website. Build it anew, using the same designs, colour schemes and fonts. You can build a website in a very short space of time using a multitude of tools – all you need is the domain name and some new hosting with some cheap and even free tools which will allow you to build a new website.
If you want to see how we did it, you can read our case study here.