Web Design Contract: 8 Clauses Worth Arguing About

A web design contract earns its keep on the day the relationship goes wrong. While things are going well nobody opens it. That is precisely why the clauses that matter are the ones nobody argues about at signing.

This is not a template and it is not legal advice. It is a list of the things real projects have ended up fighting over.

1. Whose name is on the domain and the hosting

The most important clause and the least often raised. The domain should be registered to you or your company, not to whoever builds the site. If someone else is the registered holder, then on the day you part ways your main asset is in their hands.

For generic domains such as .com the registrant's rights are clear. Transferring is your right, moving between registrars requires an auth code, and the registrar must supply that code within five calendar days of your request. Changing the registrant usually triggers a sixty-day transfer lock. The detail is in ICANN's FAQ for registered name holders.

Country-code domains run under their own registry rules, so do not assume any of the above applies to yours. Ask for registration in your own name at the start. Registering the domain to you takes ten minutes at the beginning and months to unpick later.

2. Who owns the code and the design files

"Delivering the site" and "delivering the code" are two different things. Write down that after final payment the source, the layered design files and the administrative access all transfer to you. If the builder is working on a theme or plugin of their own, state whether your licence is perpetual or annual.

3. What "delivered" means

Without a definition, delivered means whatever the other party says it means. A defensible version: the site is live on the real domain, the agreed pages exist, forms send to a real inbox, it works on mobile, and it has been checked in the two browsers your audience actually uses. Every one of those you leave out becomes an argument later.

4. How many revision rounds, and what counts as one

Say how many rounds of changes are included and note that changing the overall design direction is not a revision. This clause protects both sides. Without it, a three-week project takes three months and the work gets worse, not better.

5. Who supplies the content, and by when

Across the projects that ran late, one pattern repeats and it is not the code: the text and the photographs did not arrive on time. Put a date on content delivery and write that if content is late, the delivery date moves with it. That clause is more useful in practice than any late penalty.

6. Tie payment to deliverables, not to dates

Attach payment stages to outputs: design approved, staging site live, final handover. Payments keyed to calendar dates turn into disputes the moment anything slips, and something always slips.

7. What is free after launch

Separate fixing from changing. A button that does not work is a fix and should cost nothing. A new page is new work. Put a duration on the commitment too. We publish our own support and guarantee terms so they get read before signing rather than during a disagreement.

8. If the work stops halfway

The clause nobody enjoys writing. If the engagement ends mid-project, what gets handed over and how is the balance settled? At minimum: everything built so far, plus the access credentials. Without it, a half-finished site sits on a server you do not hold the keys to.

And one more that people forget: access. List what has to be handed over at the end: hosting panel, site administration, Search Console and analytics, and domain management. A project where the analytics account is still under the builder's email address has not finished.

One sentence that replaces five clauses

Anything required to operate the site is registered in the client's name. That single line does the work of several separate clauses and moves the conversation off a case-by-case footing. A supplier who objects to it has just told you something useful. The limit on all of this: writing a clause in plain language does not replace a lawyer, so for a contract of any size have the final wording read by someone whose job that is.

Questions we get asked

How long should the contract be?

Two clear pages beat ten vague ones. If you cannot explain a clause simply, it probably will not be enforceable in practice either.

What is a reasonable deposit?

There is no fixed figure; it scales with the project. What matters more is that the remaining payments are tied to output rather than to time passing.

Should I sign a maintenance retainer up front?

You do not have to, but ask the rate up front. A rate quoted after handover is always higher than the one quoted while the supplier was still competing for the job.

Before signing, put the cost breakdown and the delivery stages next to the contract and check that every stage is named somewhere in it. Any stage without a name is the next dispute. The terms we work under are published in our terms of engagement, and they are the baseline for any design project with us.

Last reviewed: August 2026