Is Your Business Considering Switching Website Agencies?
Is it time to switch website agencies? Perhaps you’re not getting the support you had hoped for. You’re not getting the data you need to grow your business. The communication is lacking or it’s difficult to make timely but critical updates.
These are all indicators that it’s time for a change. We believe that successful websites are a partnership, one where your team and your agency are working together to create a product that best represents and contributes to the growth of your business.
When it is time to switch agencies, you need to be prepared. It can often be a complex transition, but with the right plan, the website agency switch can be a seamless affair.
Get Clarity On What You Control
It’s your website, so everything belongs to you…right? Not necessarily. It depends on what kind of agreement you signed with your website agency.
We want our clients to own their websites. We created your website content for your business. It’s yours. If you leave us, it leaves with you.
But not every agency works this way.
Some are “renting” you content and imagery. This might be strategic in that it makes the relationship harder to unravel. Whatever the case, if you should decide to switch agencies, you’re effectively having to start over.
So it’s essential to have clarity on what aspects of the website you own, what you control, and what you don’t, based on your agency partnership.
The Top 3 Things You Should Have Clarity On Regarding Your Website
- Your website domain
- Your website content
- Your website imagery
Your website domain
Your website’s address on the internet is the most foundational aspect of your online identity. If your agency owns your domain, or if you should somehow lose control or access to your domain, your business is in a rather precarious position.
Can you change your website domain? Sure, just like a person can change their name, but similar to a personal name change, changing your domain can create a whole slew of difficulties for your business.
Missed opportunities, erosion of brand recognition, loss of domain authority, and of course, lost revenue.
It’s typically just not worth it.
And Formada doesn’t set up any of our website relationships with clients where we own your domain.
It’s yours. So we highly recommend you look carefully at who owns your website domain when entering into a new agency relationship. If you don’t own it, we don’t recommend it.
Your website content
Some website management companies actually own the content they place on your site. You’re essentially leasing the content.
So if you should ever leave their services, you essentially have to undertake building a whole new website, which is obviously a massive undertaking, often discouraging businesses from making a much-needed switch.
For the businesses that lease content, they have the ability to provide a cheap, off-the-shelf niche product at scale, which is appealing to many business owners. They get industry-specific content at a faster pace and often at a lower price.
But this off-the-shelf content complicates things for your business. One, you don’t own it, and therefore you don’t get to keep it if you leave your agency. But it also complicates things as they relate to SEO and GEO.
Search engines are looking for original, relevant, and useful content, rewarding domains by elevating them in search. Similarly in GEO (generative engine optimization), these AI tools are looking for context-rich, informational conversational content that is well structured and follows Google’s EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) guidelines.
In order to be most effective, website content should be updated regularly, as often as every six months in some cases. Duplicate, off-the-shelf-content can’t typically keep your business relevant in this search environment.
Your website imagery
Imagery is a little trickier. If your business uses stock photography, which is incredibly common, it’s often the agency that licenses those images.
While the best case scenario is to have your own custom imagery, we understand that this isn’t realistic for every business. An easy second place is stock photography that is licensed by you, the client, where it remains under your management, no matter what agency you’re working with.
You leave an agency, everything goes with you. Easy peasy.
But there are other ways to make this work for you, as well. It can be more cost effective at times for our clients to use stock photography that we have the licenses for.
In the instance that you leave our services, you also leave with a complete database of your website imagery and sources so that you can license the images yourself.
Other Things To Consider When Switching Website Agencies
Login information
Seems obvious, right? You’d be surprised how many businesses don’t have this information stored internally. And it’s often not just one login that you need to effectively manage your website.
Your domain, your DNS management, and your registration can sometimes have separate logins. Make sure that you have them filed in a secure place, regardless of whether or not you plan to switch agencies.
Logo files
Your logo is a central part of your brand, but it’s not unusual for these critical assets to be in the sole possession of your agency. Make sure that there are documented instances of these files stored internally so that your new agency can support your brand accordingly.
Your contacts
Is the information about people who contacted you via your website stored in your website database, or is it in your own CMS? You don’t want to lose this information!
Third-party plugin info
Having this information can help ensure that there are no broken links or other related issues when migrating your website
Landing pages
Some businesses use a separate service for building landing pages related to paid campaigns. Others build landing pages on their website. Not all agencies can see this information when auditing your website, so knowing and sharing this information can help your new agency ensure that campaigns don’t get disrupted or lost.
A website backup
In the instance that something happens to your website during migration, having a backup of your site that can be turned on while the new instance can be reviewed and fixed will keep you from losing visitors and business.
Your email
Does your business email use your domain name? If so, a website transfer may impact it.
When we migrate a website, we do our best to make sure that the transfer does not make any changes to DNS other than where the website is being hosted, or where we’re pointing the domain.
We want to have as much familiarity with your website setup as possible to make sure that there’s no unintended impact on your email or MX records, which are the DNS records that are used for email setups.
Google ads
Migrating a site without knowing that your Google ads are connected to your domain can often break a campaign, leading to wasted dollars and lost opportunities.
Redirections
If you have redirect rules with your prior hosting and then start to use different hosting with your new agency, then a lot of your redirections could be lost, which will affect your site SEO, create broken links, or serve site visitors old, irrelevant links.
What Healthy Website Agency Onboarding Looks Like
We believe that your partnership with Formada starts before the website is even under our management, so we can act as an advocate for a smoother website migration experience.
Most businesses don’t know about everything they need to know in order to migrate their website, and if their current agency relationship is less than amicable, it can be difficult to ask for the assets, information, and assistance you need for a successful switch.
We can act as your proxy to help with the migration prior and during the site transfer.
We also want to get a clear understanding of what your goals for the website are. It’s not unusual that when you’re switching website agencies, it’s because you want the site to serve a different purpose or serve that same purpose more effectively.
What role does it currently play in your business? How is it being used in your marketing? What new ideas or growth goals do you have that might not be represented in the current iteration of the website?
Having your current website analytics as a baseline will help us understand how the site has been performing so that we can create new benchmarks to measure our success with the newly migrated website.
Migrating your website can be stressful, but our goal is to alleviate that stress while supporting your business as it enters into the next phase of its online identity.
When choosing a new agency to support your site, we recommend that you look beyond the enticing, “big wow!” features and technical aspects and think more about, “What role does my website play for our business and our audience? Who is in the best position to help me realize those goals?”
Time To Switch Website Agencies? Formada Can Help.
Your agency shouldn’t make you feel like you’re wearing handcuffs.
You should like your website. You should like the relationship you have with your agency. It should be easy to make updates, add content, and get your analytics.
You should feel like a priority.
Ready for a different kind of agency experience? One where your goals are put first? Then contact Formada. We’re here to help your business grow.