Handing over a club website: the checklist

If you are handing over a club website, or you have just been handed one, do not start with the passwords. Start with the last renewal invoice: it tells you more about what your club owns than an hour with the person who has been running the site.

Nobody is being difficult here. Clubs lose control of their website the boring way: a member set it up on their own account years ago, it worked, and nobody looked again until they stepped down. Then the committee finds that “the website” cannot be handed over, because it is not a thing.

Handing over a club website: start with the invoice

Invoices are dull, and dull is what you want. A renewal invoice carries the name of the company you are paying, the name the contract is in, and the last four digits of the card being charged. Ask for two: one for the domain, one for the hosting — often different companies, which is the first surprise.

If the hosting bill arrives in the old treasurer’s personal inbox and comes off his own debit card, the contract is his, whatever the club reimburses him. Nobody did anything wrong; it is simply a fact you have to unpick, and you can only unpick it once you know it.

Do not expect the public record to do this for you. Any .com, .org or .co.uk domain can be looked up through WHOIS or RDAP, but for most domains the registrant’s contact details come back redacted — registrars withhold them by default under ICANN’s rules rather than publish a private individual’s address. So you get the registrar’s name and the dates: useful, because it tells you which company to log into, but not whose account the domain sits in. Only the account itself shows that.

The six separate things behind the word “website”

Ask “who has the website?” and someone gives you a name, and you both feel like the problem is solved. There is no single object to hand over, though — there are six, and they can sit in six different places.

1. The domain — the address itself, yourclub.org. It lives in an account at a registrar, and that account records a registrant: the party the domain belongs to. The club, or the member who filled in the form when the site was built? Who the domain belongs to quietly decides everything else on this list.
2. The hosting — the space the files sit on. Its own contract, its own renewal date, frequently its own company.
3. The link between the two — a setting somebody typed once, pointing the address at the files. Treat it as a forwarding instruction: whoever can edit it decides what visitors see, without ever touching the hosting.
4. The login to the site itself — where the words get changed: WordPress, a site builder, or files someone uploads by hand. Does everyone share one account, or does each person have their own?
5. The club’s email addresses — committee@, treasurer@. Usually part of the hosting package, occasionally bought elsewhere. Chase this one first: password resets for almost everything else land in that mailbox, so whoever reads it can get into the rest.
6. The accounts that are not the website — the Google Business Profile, the Facebook page, Instagram, a mailing-list tool, the club’s entry on the league site. Different people set them up in different years, each with its own idea of who is in charge. The Google Business Profile is worth checking properly: two roles, owner and manager, exactly one primary owner per profile, and managers cannot add or remove people. Accept a manager role and you can fix the opening hours but hand nothing on at the next handover.

Put the club’s name on it, not a member’s

Every account should sit on a club address: committee@yourclub.org. That address can be handed to the next person; a personal Gmail belongs to a human being who is entitled to keep it. The address outlives whoever holds it this year. If you take one thing from this piece, take that.

Then write down where each of the six things lives. One page is plenty: what it is, which company holds it, whose name is on it, when it renews, who has access. Keep passwords out — it is an index, and they belong in a password manager the committee as a whole can open. Store it wherever your club keeps its constitution — that is where anyone will look in three years’ time.

Being straight with you: we build websites for a living, so we have an obvious interest in you picking up the phone. Which is why it is worth saying plainly — you do not need us, or any agency, for this. Nobody should be paid to dig out an old invoice. If the handover turns into “while we’re at it, let’s redo the whole thing”, that is a separate decision: re-read what a small site actually needs first.

Four things for the next committee meeting

• The last renewal invoice for the domain, and the last one for the hosting. Two different companies is normal.
• Which mailbox do the renewal notices arrive in? If nobody knows, that is the most useful thing you will learn all week.
• A look inside the registrar account at the registrant field. Whose name is actually on it?
• One page listing the six things, filed where the constitution lives.

One last thing, and it is the part people leave too late. Volunteers who have kept a club website going for a decade are almost always happy to explain the lot — over a pint, in twenty minutes, for nothing. What they are not is permanently available. Ask while they are still in the WhatsApp group.