How to handover your site to clients

Hey, it’s Henry from the Wix Studio team. Let’s talk about how you can make the process of handing over a Wix Studio site to your clients way smoother.

It’s always a good idea to onboard your clients with a bespoke client kit before you hand over their site.

If you’re not sure how to add one, check out the tutorial linked in this video’s description.

Now, there are two main ways you can hand over a site:

First, if you’ll be the one maintaining the site for your client, simply add them as a collaborator, which’ll let them comment on your work, edit content or even edit your designs—depending on the permissions you give them.

Or, if your client will be taking full control, you can transfer full site ownership to them.

Let’s start with adding your client as a collaborator.

To send an invitation to a client, you’ll…

Go to Sites in your Wix Studio workspace…

Hover over the Collaborators icon on their site…

Click Invite People…

Enter your client’s email address….

And click the checkbox next to the relevant role or roles you want to give them.

Choose any of these options, depending on how much access you’d like them to have.

If you only give them permission to edit content…

…they’ll be able to edit the text and media on the site with this panel on the right, but they won’t be able to affect your designs.

This option lets them take control of their own content, without risking the integrity of your design.

Or, they can have full access as a Website Owner or Co-Owner…

This’ll give them access to make more changes and to directly edit your designs, again, depending on which permissions you give them.

Once you're finished, click Send Invite.

In this pop-up, just select Client and then Done.

Now, this collaborator will be marked as "CLIENT" in your Roles & Permissions table.

Once your client accepts the invitation, and depending on the permissions you granted, they’ll be able to comment on your work from right within the Studio Editor…

… edit their content themselves…

…or even edit your designs.

But they won’t be able to delete or transfer the site.

To let them do that, you’d need to transfer the entire site ownership to them.

To transfer full ownership of a Premium site, go to your dashboard, click the Site Actions icon at the top of the Home page and select Transfer site.

Next, fill out the Transfer Ownership form. You’ll need to know the email address associated with the new owner's Wix account, mark them as a client and either enable or disable these transfer options:

Transfer Premium plan, where the site and the plan assigned to it will both be transferred to the new owner's account…

And transfer domain & business email, where the site’ll be transferred along with its domain and any associated mailboxes.

Check Transfer premium apps to hand those off to the new owner…

And choose whether you want to keep your role as Co-Owner of this site after the transfer.

If you select it, you’ll still be a collaborator on the site with limited access, and the new site owner can revoke your access at any time.

But if you don’t, you won’t be able to edit or manage the site in any way after the transfer.

Bear in mind, you’ll need to stay connected to a site at least as a collaborator to keep any points you've earned from it, so, in most cases, you’ll want to select “Keep my role as Co-Owner of this site after the transfer”.

You also have the option to create a copy of the site to keep in your own account. But even if you don’t make a copy but you do keep your role as Co-Owner, you’ll still be able to edit the site.

To finish up, click Continue, review the transfer details and notes, select the confirmation checkbox, click Transfer Ownership and finally, click Got it.

Now, your client will get an invite email where they’ll need to confirm the transfer to accept ownership within three days of when you send it.

And you can go to Roles and Permissions to track and manage your transfers at any time.

Just one last note, if you used Avalara to calculate tax on the site you’re transferring, you'll need to create a new Avalara account for any new sites you create moving forward.

And that’s it, you’re ready to hand off your sites to your clients smoothly.

Check out the Wix Studio Academy for more lessons and tutorials.

‘Til next time.