How to accept a website from a contractor: checklist before payment
The contractor delivers the site. You open the link, click two buttons, and send payment. A week later you discover the forms don't work, half the pages break on mobile, and you have no hosting access. Going back to the contractor feels awkward, fixes drag on, the money is gone. You can avoid this by accepting work against a checklist, not by eyeballing it.
Open the site on phone and tablet
More than half your visitors will arrive on mobile. If the site breaks on a phone, buttons overlap, or text spills off the screen, that's not a minor issue. That's defective work.
Open the homepage, three internal pages, and the contact form. Check that everything is readable without horizontal scrolling, buttons respond on the first tap, the menu opens. Rotate the phone to landscape and check again.
If you only have an iPhone, ask someone to open the site on Android. Layout can behave differently, and what works in Safari sometimes breaks in Chrome on an older Samsung.
Fill out every form and verify emails arrive
A contact form that doesn't send email is the most expensive mistake. You pay for advertising, a customer fills out the form, and you get nothing.
Fill out every form on the site: callback request, quote calculator, newsletter signup. Use your own email and phone. Check that the message arrives within a minute. If it lands in spam, that's also a problem. Ask the contractor to configure SPF and DKIM.
If the form sends to Telegram or a CRM, verify the data appears there. Sometimes the email arrives but the CRM entry never gets created because the integration wasn't finished.
Check loading speed
A slow site loses visitors before they see your offer. Google's research shows that if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, half your users will leave.
Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste your site address, and run the test. The service gives a score from 0 to 100 separately for desktop and mobile. If mobile scores below 50, that's bad. Below 30 is very bad. Ask the contractor to optimize.
Pay attention to the specific issues PageSpeed lists: unoptimized images, missing caching, unnecessary scripts. These aren't abstract complaints. They're concrete things the contractor can fix in a couple of hours.
Make sure you have all access credentials
The site should belong to you, not the contractor. If the domain, hosting, and email are registered to the agency, you're held hostage. Want to switch contractors or renew services directly? You can't.
Ask for access to the domain registrar, hosting account (where the site files live), email (if corporate email was set up), and the site admin panel. Verify the credentials work: log into each panel and confirm you can change something.
If the contractor says everything is registered to us but you're the owner, that's not an answer. Either transfer it to your name or demand full access with the right to transfer to third parties. A site you can't administrate is not your site.
Verify you can edit content
Log into the admin panel and try changing text on the homepage, adding a blog post or product, replacing an image. If every edit requires calling the contractor, you have a bad CMS or no CMS at all.
Ask how often the platform and plugins need updating and who does it. If there's no answer or we'll update it for a fee, ask what happens if you don't update. Outdated plugins get hacked. That's not a scare story.
Request documentation: how to add a page, how to change the phone number in the header, how to upload a product. If the contractor says it's intuitive, don't believe it. Ask for a screencast or written guide. In three months you'll forget where everything is.
Open every page and check nothing is broken
Go through every menu item. Open service pages, contact, privacy policy. Check for empty pages, placeholder text like lorem ipsum, broken links that lead nowhere.
Click the buttons. All of them. Even the ones that look decorative. Sometimes a Learn More button leads to a page that doesn't exist or opens a PDF the contractor forgot to upload.
If the site has search, enter a few queries and verify it returns something. A search function that shows an empty page for every query is better removed entirely.
Check the site doesn't break when you're offline
This sounds odd, but test the site from mobile data, from a different browser, from incognito mode. Sometimes a site works perfectly on the contractor's computer and nowhere else because fonts, images, or scripts are stored on a local server.
One more simple test: ask a colleague or friend to open the site on their device. If it loads for you but not for someone else, that's not a coincidence. That's a problem.
Ask what happens in a year
Domain and hosting renew annually. Ask when the paid period ends, who handles renewal, what it costs, what happens if you don't renew on time. A site that vanished because someone forgot to renew the domain is a classic.
Clarify whether technical support is included and what it covers. We won't abandon you isn't an answer. You need to know whether the contractor will fix a bug for free three months later or whether that counts as new work.
If the contractor promises lifetime support, get the terms in the contract. Agencies close, people quit, free support has a way of ending. Better to know the rules up front.
What to do if you find an error
Don't pay for the site until you have an answer to every item on the list above. This isn't nitpicking. It's basic verification that takes an hour.
Write out your feedback as text: what doesn't work, on which page, what exactly needs fixing. Screenshots help. The site feels off isn't feedback the contractor can act on.
Agree on a deadline for fixes and only then transfer payment. If the contract doesn't state that you accept the work after corrections are made, add that to the acceptance report.
At EFIMOV DEV we hand over the site with a completed acceptance checklist, all credentials, and a management guide. We discuss revisions until everything is closed, not after payment. That's standard practice, not an extra service.
If this is already on your plate, here is how we do it end to end: Corporate website development.
Frequently asked
Can you accept a site in stages?+
Yes, if it's written into the contract. Usually it's split into design, layout, and development. You accept each stage separately, sign off, and pay. But do the final acceptance against the full checklist anyway. A form bug that appeared during integration isn't your problem, even if you already accepted the layout.
What if the contractor refuses to hand over credentials?+
Don't pay until you get them. A site without access credentials isn't your property, it's a rental that ends when the contractor decides. If the contract says credentials will be transferred and the contractor stalls, that's a breach. You can demand penalties or termination.
Do you need to test the site in different browsers?+
Yes, at minimum Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Even better, test on older versions because not everyone updates their browser. If your audience is older or using office computers, they often run browsers that are three years out of date.
What are SPF and DKIM and why check them?+
These are settings that confirm emails from your domain are sent by you, not a spammer. Without them, messages from contact forms often go to spam. The contractor should configure this by default if they're setting up corporate email or site forms.
How do you know the site is protected from hacking?+
Ask whether an SSL certificate is installed (the address starts with https), whether plugins are updated, whether backups exist. If it's a WordPress site with no security plugins and the admin panel at the default /wp-admin address, that's a hole. Request at least basic protection: login attempt limits, hidden platform version, a firewall.