Build a site alone and everything lives in your head. Where the domain was bought, when the hosting renews, which service the mail goes out through — you know it all, so writing it down seems pointless.
The problem is that this state is a weakness in the business. When you hire someone, when you delegate part of the work, when you come back after months away, and above all when something unexpected happens — if one person is the only one who knows, the business stops at that moment.
Four sections on one page
This is not a manual. One page is enough, and the first draft takes about an hour.
The asset list matters most. For each item, note only two things: which service, and under which account. The registrar for the domain, the provider and plan for hosting, the sending service for mail, and the repository address if there is code.
Recording renewal dates is a practical matter. Sites going dark because a domain renewal was missed is not a rare event, and a quietly expired payment card causes the same thing.
Passwords do not belong in the document
The moment you write passwords into it, the document itself becomes a file that must never leak. Sharing gets difficult — and a handover document nobody can share has lost its purpose.
Use a password manager instead and record only the location: “the password for this account is under such-and-such entry”. When someone needs access, share through the manager, and revoke it when the relationship ends.
Half the value is confirming ownership
Writing the document surfaces a problem on its own: some accounts are not in your name. Domains registered under the account of whoever helped build the site, hosting paid on a friend’s card — both happen more often than you would expect.
None of that matters while relationships are good, but recovering an asset once contact is lost takes time. While you have the document open, move everything into the business’s own name. That task is half of what a handover document is for.
Finally, open the page twice a year. Services change and plans change, so a document that is never refreshed becomes a document that misinforms.
Closing the series
Across eight parts you have put structure before design, copy before layout, established what the built-in editor does, gathered colour and type into one place, checked mobile and images, decided what to delegate, and finally written this page down. Reaching this point without a designer or a developer leaves you with a company site that holds up.
What remains is the work beyond that boundary. Version upgrades, performance work and security review are handled as a single job by our optimization program, and the order we actually work in is published on the process page. For everything that comes up in day-to-day operation, the development workflow archive carries on from here.