Building a Website Someone Else Can Maintain

Every website eventually gets handed to someone other than the person who built it — a new developer, an internal team, a different agency. How easily that happens is decided during the build, and it is a fair proxy for whether the build was done well.

Version control, from the first commit

Theme and custom code in a repository the client owns, with meaningful commit messages. This is baseline professional practice and it is still absent from a large share of the sites we are asked to take over.

Without it, nobody can tell what changed, when, or why. A site where three developers have edited files directly over four years takes days to understand before any work can begin, and the client pays for that.

Content as structured fields, not free-form blobs

When content lives in defined fields — heading, intro, service list, FAQ items — it can be edited safely, reused elsewhere, and restyled without rewriting. When it lives as one large formatted blob from a page builder, every change risks the layout and nothing can be reused.

This also determines whether the site can later feed structured data, a sitemap, an app, or anything else. Content modelled properly is an asset; content pasted into a builder is a liability with a nice appearance.

Documentation that answers the real questions

Not a manual nobody reads. A short document covering where things live, how to deploy, what the environment needs, which third-party services are connected and what they do, where credentials are stored, and what routine maintenance is due.

One page of that saves more time than fifty pages of generated API documentation. The test is whether a competent developer could deploy a change on their first day using it alone.

Accounts in the client's name

Domain, hosting, repository, analytics, Search Console, advertising accounts and any third-party services registered to the business, with access granted to whoever is working on it.

This is occasionally resisted, and the resistance is itself informative. Accounts held by a supplier are leverage, and a supplier who needs leverage is telling you something about the work.

Advertising accounts matter most because the historical data has real value and cannot be transferred if the account belongs to someone else.

Conventional choices where nothing is gained by being clever

Standard directory structures, widely used libraries, and conventional patterns mean the next developer recognises what they are looking at. Unusual architecture needs a reason that outweighs the cost of everyone having to learn it.

The same applies to dependencies. Every unusual package is something the next person has to evaluate, and something that may be unmaintained in three years.

Why this is in the supplier's interest too

A client who knows they could leave, and stays, is a better client than one who stays because leaving is painful. Lock-in produces resentment and it produces the version of the relationship where neither side is trying.

It also makes your own work easier. The documentation and structure that help a successor help you when you return to the project after eighteen months and remember none of it.