Leaving a web company is mostly an admin problem, and the ones that go badly go badly for the same reason every time: someone gave notice before finding out what they actually controlled.
Do it in this order and the whole thing is uneventful.
Before you say anything, find out what you control
This is the whole game. Relationships that end amicably are easy. The ones that don't are survivable only if the important things are already in your name.
- The domain. Look up your domain on any public whois service. The registrant details tell you who Google and the registrar consider the owner. Then try logging in to the registrar. If you have no login, you don't control your address.
- The hosting. Do you have an account and a password, or has it always been handled for you?
- DNS. Sometimes at the registrar, sometimes at the host, sometimes at a third service. Whoever controls DNS controls where your domain points, including your email.
- The site itself. Files, database, or a CMS admin login.
- Analytics and Search Console. Often set up under an agency account, which means your traffic history walks out with them.
- Google Business Profile. Frequently created by whoever did the marketing. Check that you have owner access, not manager access.
- Email. If your business email runs through the same domain, this is the part that can stop your business for a day.
If the domain is registered in someone else's name, deal with that before anything else. Everything else is recoverable. Losing the address your customers know isn't.
Get yourself added properly
For anything you don't control, ask now, while the relationship is still normal. A calm request during business as usual gets a different response than the same request after notice.
The wording that works is straightforward: you're tidying up your business records and want to make sure accounts are in the company name with your billing details, as they should be. That's true and it's not a confrontation.
For the Business Profile, ask specifically for owner access. Manager access can be revoked by the owner, and it's not the same thing.
The order that avoids downtime
The single rule: never cancel anything until the new setup is live and confirmed. Almost every horror story is somebody cancelling hosting on the first of the month and discovering that email went with it.
- Take a full copy of the existing site. Every page, every image, every PDF. Even if you're rebuilding, you need the content and the URL list.
- Write down every existing URL. This becomes the redirect map, and skipping it is how businesses lose the rankings they spent years earning.
- Build the new site somewhere else, on a temporary address.
- Move the domain registration into your own account if it's not already, and unlock it.
- Point DNS at the new host, leaving the email records exactly as they are unless you're moving email too.
- Confirm the new site is live, forms work, and email still arrives. Give it a couple of days.
- Then, and only then, cancel the old service.
Keeping the rankings you already have
A rebuild that changes URLs without redirects throws away whatever search position the old site had. Google has no way to know that your new yoursite.com/services/roof-repair is the old yoursite.com/roofrepair.html, so the old page's credit goes nowhere.
- Keep the same URLs wherever there's no good reason to change them.
- Where they change, set a permanent redirect from every old address to the closest new one.
- Redirect to the matching page, never all of them to the homepage.
- Keep the pages that were bringing in traffic, even if you dislike them. Search Console tells you which those are.
- Resubmit the sitemap after launch and watch coverage for a few weeks.
If they won't hand things over
It happens, and it's usually recoverable.
The domain is the serious one. If it's registered to them, start with a polite written request. If that fails, the registrar has a dispute process, and a domain registered in bad faith to a business that has been using and paying for it is not a strong position for them to hold. Where a real trademark is involved there's a formal complaint route.
Hosting and files are less critical. A site can be rebuilt, and if you have a copy of the content you have lost time rather than assets.
Business Profile ownership can be recovered through Google's own process for requesting access, which contacts the current owner and transfers ownership if they don't respond within a set period.
Whatever happens, register the next domain yourself, on your own card, and treat that login the way you treat your banking one.