How to Leave a Vendor Cleanly

The order matters more than the conversation

Owners usually get this backwards. They tell the vendor first, then discover what the vendor controls. The right order is to know exactly what the business will need on day thirty before saying a word on day zero, because a vendor who has been given notice has no reason to be helpful, and a vendor who holds the domain has every reason not to be.

Before giving notice

Collect these, and confirm each one works from a login the business owns, not one the vendor shares.

• The domain: the account where the website address is registered, in the business’s name, with the renewal card the business controls.
• The hosting account: where the website lives, with the top-level login.
• The website files and the database, exported and stored somewhere the business can reach.
• The Google Business Profile: the business as primary owner, the vendor removed as a manager or downgraded.
• Review-site logins, social pages, and any directory listings the vendor set up.
• Tracking phone numbers: which account they live in, and where they forward. A tracking number the vendor owns disappears with the vendor, and it may be the number on the truck.
• Every subscription the vendor pays on the business’s behalf, with the renewal dates.
• The customer list and any email list, exported.

The thirty days

• Day zero. Notice in writing, in the form the contract requires, with the end date stated. Nothing else in the message.
• Days one to seven. Confirm every login above works from the business’s own account, and change the passwords on anything the vendor could still reach.
• Days eight to twenty. Handover: files, exports, the tracking-number transfer, the subscription list. Pay the final invoice on time; a vendor waiting on money holds the files.
• Days twenty-one to thirty. Remove the vendor from every account. Move billing for every subscription to the business’s card. Check that the website, the listing, and the phone number on the truck all still work on the morning after.

What not to do

• Do not sign the next vendor before the exit is done. The new one will want the same logins, and if the old one still holds them, the shop is paying two vendors for nothing.
• Do not let the site go dark to make a point. Homeowners searching that week do not know there was a dispute.
• Do not argue in the notice. The contract says what it says; the argument, if there is one, happens after the logins are safe.

When this is not an exit

If the website is built on a system only the vendor can edit, there is nothing to hand over, and leaving means a migration: a new site, built on a platform the business owns, before the old one is turned off. That takes longer than thirty days and it is the reason the ownership question belongs in the first conversation with the next vendor, not the last one with this one.