The Handover Hangover: Ten Checks for a Website You Didn't Build
Starting a new marketing job is exciting. Then you log into the website and realise the last team left you a digital house with a leaky roof, a mystery fuse box and a loft full of old brochures. The temptation is to knock it all down and start again. Don't. Not yet. A rebuild is expensive, slow and politically risky. Before you commit, run a ten-point audit of the estate you've inherited. It'll surface the risks, the quick wins and the awkward conversations you need to have with your finance director.
1. Analytics: who's actually watching?
Open Google Analytics 4 and ask a simple question: can you explain what a conversion is? If not, neither can your board. Check that goals and key events are set up, that internal traffic is filtered, and that you have admin access rather than a lonely viewer login. Look for gaps in tracking since the handover. A quiet week might be a data problem, not a marketing problem. Quick win: get full ownership of the analytics account and document what's measured before you change anything.
2. Consent and the cookie banner
UK GDPR and PECR haven't gone away. Check whether tags fire before consent, whether the banner is genuinely balanced, and whether 'reject all' is as easy to find as 'accept all'. Then look at consent rates. A clunky banner can cost you measurable conversions, especially on mobile. If the previous agency installed a consent tool nobody understands, that's a risk. Quick win: test the journey yourself on a phone and screenshot anything that feels dark-pattern-ish.
3. Content debt
Every inherited site has pages nobody visits, offers that expired two years ago and a blog post about a lockdown webinar. Use a crawler and analytics to find pages with low traffic, high bounce or duplicate content. Decide whether to keep, merge, redirect or bin. Content debt isn't just messy; it dilutes search equity and confuses buyers. Quick win: kill or redirect the ten worst offenders this month.
4. SEO foundations
Get access to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Check indexation, sitemaps, robots.txt and canonical tags. Look for sudden drops in impressions, manual actions or a redirect chain that looks like spaghetti. Review the top landing pages and queries. If the site ranks for things you don't sell, that's a strategy problem. Quick win: fix broken internal links and make sure the XML sitemap actually reflects the site you want indexed.
5. Accessibility
Accessibility is a legal and commercial issue, not a nice-to-have. Run a basic WCAG 2.2 check: keyboard navigation, colour contrast, alt text, form labels and focus states. Try buying something using only a keyboard. If you can't, a chunk of your audience can't either. Quick win: fix the obvious contrast and alt-text issues on your highest-traffic templates.
6. Security and maintenance
Find out who has admin access to the CMS, hosting and DNS. Check for two-factor authentication, stale user accounts and plugins that haven't been updated since the last Olympics. Confirm backups exist and that someone has actually tested a restore. A hacked site is a brand problem, a legal problem and a very expensive weekend. Quick win: remove old users and turn on 2FA today.
7. Hosting and performance
Test Core Web Vitals on mobile. Check server location, caching and whether the hosting package matches the traffic you actually get. A cheap shared host can be a false economy if your checkout takes six seconds to load. Quick win: run a performance test and take a baseline before you change a thing.
8. Integrations and martech wiring
Forms feed the CRM. The CRM feeds email. Email feeds reporting. Or at least that's the theory. Check whether leads are arriving, whether UTM parameters survive the journey and whether anyone owns the integrations. Look for duplicate form submissions, orphaned landing pages and tools nobody logs into. Quick win: submit a test lead and follow it all the way to the sales inbox.
9. Vendor contracts and spend
Dig out the invoices. Who owns the domain? Who pays for hosting? Which licences auto-renew and when? Are you paying for a CDN, a heat-mapping tool and a social scheduler that nobody uses? Check exit clauses and notice periods. Inherited contracts are where quiet overspend hides. Quick win: build a one-page renewal calendar and put it in the team diary.
10. Access and ownership
This is the boring one that saves you later. Make sure you control the domain registrar, DNS, CMS, analytics, ad accounts and social profiles. If a former agency holds the keys, get them transferred before you need them. Use a shared password manager, not a spreadsheet called 'logins final v3'. Quick win: list every account, note who owns it and close the gaps.
What to do with the findings
Don't turn the audit into a 60-slide deck that nobody reads. Split findings into three buckets: stop-the-bleeding risks, quick wins and rebuild candidates. Fix the risks first. Bank the quick wins. Then decide whether a rebuild is genuinely needed or whether you're just embarrassed by the old design.
The website you inherited is not automatically a bad website. It might be a decent site with poor plumbing. Audit the estate, get the keys, and make decisions with evidence rather than vibes. Your future self will thank you.
