How to read a website vendor's contract

We are a website vendor telling you how to read website vendors’ contracts, so hold us to the same reading. This is not a red-flags listicle; most vendors are not villains. But contracts allocate power for the day interests stop aligning, and in this industry the allocation is consistently lopsided in ways busy agents only discover at exit. Six clauses decide almost everything. Read these before price.

The domain

Whoever registers the domain controls your address on the internet. Some vendors register it for you — convenient, and fine if the contract says it is registered in your name and transfers freely on exit. If the vendor holds it, every year of business cards, referral links, and search history accrues to an asset they can hold. The question to ask verbatim: “If I leave, do I take my domain with me, at no cost, immediately?” The full ownership picture is bigger than the domain — we walk it through in do I own my website — but the domain is where ownership starts.

The data

Your contacts, their consent records, notes, and history are the asset your business actually runs on. The contract should name what exports, in what format, and for how long after cancellation. Vague is a no: “reasonable assistance with data migration” means whatever the vendor decides it means during an exit negotiation. Our own stance, published: month-to-month terms, and your data stays exportable for 90 days after you cancel. The same discipline applies when leaving a brokerage with your CRM data — portability is decided before you sign, never after.

The term

Term length is a price mechanism — a discount for commitment can be a fair, open trade. Read it together with two neighbours: automatic renewal (does silence re-commit you for another year, and how long is the cancellation window?) and fee escalation (can the price rise mid-term or on renewal without consent?). A fair contract makes renewal a decision you take, not a deadline you miss.

The feed

MLS data reaches your site under a board agreement, and whose name is on it matters. When the data agreement runs through your own membership with the vendor as technical provider, your listings capability is portable. When everything runs through the vendor’s own arrangement, your site’s core feature may be structurally theirs. Ask where you would stand with the board the day the relationship ends — an approved member with a replaceable technical vendor, or a site that lost its listings with its login.

The design and content

The pages you wrote, the photos you commissioned, your branding — those should be unambiguously yours. Template designs typically stay with the vendor, which is fair; you licensed a design, you did not buy it. The clause to check is the one covering content you created inside their editor. And if leads flow through the site, the lead-ownership language deserves the same scrutiny we give lead company contracts.

Read it backwards

Every clause above is really one question at different angles: what happens on the last day? So read the contract backwards. Start at termination, list what leaves with you — domain, data, content, feed relationship — and what it costs to leave. Then ask the vendor to confirm the list in writing. Better still, ask for a sample data export before you sign — five minutes for a vendor whose export actually exists, and a surprisingly clarifying request for one whose export is a promise. A good vendor answers the whole exercise in a paragraph. A pause where that paragraph should be is the most honest disclosure you will get.