Reviewing Your Web Vendor Contract Before You Renew
Web services renew quietly. The invoice arrives, it is not large enough to argue about, and another year passes. Before the next one, read the agreement with these five questions in mind.
1. Who owns what?
The contract should state plainly that you own your domain, your content, your data, and the design deliverables. Watch for language granting the vendor ownership of custom code or licensing the design to you rather than transferring it. Ownership questions are simple to settle in advance and expensive to litigate later.
2. What happens when it ends?
Termination clauses matter more than anything else in the document. What notice is required, and is there an auto-renewal window you have to act inside? Will they provide a full export of the site and its data? Is there an offboarding fee? A vendor unwilling to describe the exit in concrete terms is telling you something.
3. What is actually included?
Get specific: how many hours or requests, what counts as support versus a project, response times, whether hosting and licenses are included or billed through, and who pays for third-party software. Ambiguity here is where relationships sour, usually around month nine.
4. Where do the credentials live?
Your domain should be registered in your account. Your hosting should be in your name, even if the vendor manages it. Your analytics and search properties should have you as an owner. This is the single most common trap, and the fix costs nothing while everyone is on good terms.
5. What are you paying for versus what are you getting?
Look at the last twelve months. What did you ask for, what arrived, and how quickly? Compare that against the contracted scope. Some vendors quietly deliver far more than the agreement requires, which is worth knowing before you shop on price. Some deliver far less, which is worth raising before you sign again.
Then negotiate, politely
Renewal is when both parties are paying attention. Ask for the clarifications you want in writing. Most good providers will agree, because a clear scope protects them too. If a provider will not put ownership, exit, and inclusions in writing, that is the answer to whether you should renew.
