How to use Handover

What Handover is

When you finish a website, everything you learned building it — where the domain is registered, who holds the hosting account, which plugins matter, what the retainer covers — lives in your head and in a scattering of emails. Handover turns that into one branded page for the client.

You fill in a form of facts. Handover writes the sentences around them, in plain language a non-technical business owner can follow, and publishes it at an unlisted link in your branding. The client also gets a printable PDF.

Sections you leave empty do not appear. A manual with no retainer, no assets and no maintenance schedule reads as a complete document about a simpler arrangement, not as one with holes in it.

The no-passwords rule

Handover has no field anywhere for a password, an API key, or any other credential. This is enforced in the database, not just hidden in the interface — if you label a custom field “password”, the save is refused.

What the manual records instead is which accounts exist and who owns each one. That is the useful half. A client who needs access contacts the named owner; nobody needs a shared secret sitting in a document.

One thing the rule cannot cover: a share link you paste into Files & assets. Dropbox, Drive and Figma links often contain an access token, which means the link is the secret. Handover warns you when it spots one, but it will not stop you — if a file should not be opened by anyone with the URL, record where it lives rather than linking it.

Your first manual

1. Set your brand once. Settings holds your agency name, logo, brand colour, heading and body fonts, support email and hours. Every manual you create inherits them.
2. Create a manual. Manuals → New manual, and give it the client’s name. Nothing is public yet.
3. Fill in what you know. Work down the sections. It saves as you type.
4. Publish it when you are happy, and send the link.

Filling it in

The editor is a set of sections you can open and close. There is no save button — every field saves when you leave it.

What each section is for

• Site & Stack — what the site is built on and which plugins matter.
• Domain & DNS — registrar, expiry, who owns the domain, who can sign in to the registrar, where DNS is managed and what changed at handover. The most valuable section in the document when something breaks.
• Hosting & Email — host, plan, renewal date, mail provider.
• Accounts & Ownership — each service and its named owner.
• How To Edit — short how-tos for the everyday changes this client will actually make.
• What’s Covered — what the retainer includes and what is billed separately.
• Maintenance schedule — the recurring work, and who does each job.
• Emergency Contacts — who to call when the site is down.
• Files & assets — where the logo, brand guide and originals live.
• Client contacts — private to you. Never shown on the manual.

You can add your own fields to any section, add whole custom sections, and reorder them. Anything you leave blank simply does not render.

Ownership and access are two different questions

Domain owner is whose name the domain is registered in — the client’s, yours on their behalf, a third party’s, or not yet confirmed. Who can sign in to the registrar is a separate question, and it is the one that bites. The client is very often the registered owner while only the agency can actually log in, and nobody discovers this until the domain is expiring and the agency is long gone. Answer both.

Not every handover changes the nameservers

Plenty do not. If the client keeps DNS at their registrar or with their mail provider and you only repointed the A record at the new host, say so — the manual asks where DNS is managed, who can sign in there, and what changed at handover: a full nameserver move, records only, or nothing. Record the individual records you changed and the next developer knows exactly what was touched.

The maintenance schedule

This is the section that pays for the retainer. It lists the recurring work on the site — daily, weekly, monthly and once a year — and puts a name against every job.

You do not have to write it. Open the section on an empty manual and press Add the standard schedule: twenty-one tasks a typical site needs, each with a suggested owner. Edit, reassign or delete any of them.

On the manual itself, the owner column shows real names — your agency’s name against the jobs you do, the client’s against theirs. That is the difference between a checklist and a proposal: the client reads their own name beside seven tasks and understands what they have taken on.

Publishing

A new manual is a draft. It is not reachable by anyone but you until you press Publish, so a half-finished manual is never sitting at a public address.

While it is a draft you can still open its URL yourself — you will see the page exactly as the client will, with a banner reminding you it is not live. That banner does not print.

If you publish a manual that is less than 60% complete, Handover warns you. It does not stop you: a small site may legitimately have little to record.

Unpublish takes it offline again. Anyone holding the link gets a not-found page from that moment.

Plans, limits & archiving

Handover counts active manuals — the ones you are still maintaining for a client. Drafts do not count, and neither do archived manuals, which stay online and readable for the client either way.

There is no monthly quota and nothing resets. The number is how many manuals are published at any one time, not how many you create.

The three states a manual can be in

• Draft — never published, only you can see it. Does not count, on any plan. Keep as many as you like.
• Active — published, your client can open it, and you are still editing it. This is the one that counts.
• Archived — finished with, still online at the same address and still printable, now read-only. Does not count.

Archive, Restore and Delete all sit in the … menu at the end of a manual’s row on your manuals list, alongside Duplicate and Save as template.

Deleting a manual

Delete removes a manual and everything in it permanently — there is no undo and no recycle bin. Deleting a draft asks for a plain confirmation. Deleting a manual that has been published asks you to type the client’s name first, because their link stops working the moment you confirm.

If a client’s work is finished, archive rather than delete. Archiving frees the slot and keeps their page readable; deleting takes it away from them. Delete is for test manuals and mistakes.

How archiving works, and why it exists

Archiving frees a slot without taking anything away from your client. The manual stays online at the address they already have, they can still read it and still print it — it simply stops being edited, and stops counting against your plan.

This is the answer to the obvious problem with any limit. You finish a build in 2026 and hand the client a link. Two years later you are working with three other clients and want to publish a fourth manual. Without archiving your only options would be to pay more or to delete a real client’s page — and a document that vanishes is worse than no document at all.

So: archive the older one. The 2026 client still opens the same link and finds the same information. You publish the new manual on the same plan. Nobody loses anything.

What happens when you hit the limit

Publishing is blocked until you are back under it, and you have two ways forward: archive an older manual, or move up a plan. Nothing you have already handed to a client goes offline in either case.

If you move to a smaller plan

Nothing goes offline. Manuals that are already live stay live and readable; you just cannot publish new ones until you are under the new limit. A client’s page is never taken down because a subscription changed.

What the free plan does not include

Two things: the small “Made with Handover” line at the bottom of the page, and templates. Editing and writing email scripts is not one of them — that works on every plan. Everything else — your logo, your colours, your fonts, the live link, the printable PDF, all the sections, both languages — is the same on every plan.

Sending it to the client

Copy link puts the public URL on your clipboard. Send to client opens your own mail client with the subject and body already written in the manual’s language — the email genuinely comes from you, from your address, with your signature. Handover never emails your client.

The link is unlisted and unindexed, not private. Each manual sits at a web address ending in ten random characters, so nobody guesses it or stumbles across it, and manuals are excluded from search engines. But it is not password-protected: anyone holding the link can open it. Treat it as you would any document you email — fine to send to a client, worth not posting publicly.

Handover sign-off

A manual says what a website is. Sign-off says the handover actually happened, and what it covered. It is the last section of the editor, and it puts a dated record at the end of the client’s manual.

What you tick

• Domain ownership confirmed
• Hosting confirmed
• Accounts and access reviewed
• Credentials transferred separately
• Maintenance responsibilities explained
• Files and assets delivered

Add who you went through it with in Confirmed with, then Mark handover complete. The date is stamped for you — you never type it.

You do not have to tick everything. Some handovers genuinely have nothing to transfer, and the manual only ever shows the items you ticked. An unfinished checklist on a client’s page reads as an accusation, so the ones you left blank simply do not appear.

What the client sees

At the very end of their manual, after the last section:

Handover completed on 7 September 2026. Domain ownership confirmed · Hosting confirmed · Credentials transferred separately. Confirmed with Matthew Rosenberg.

It prints with the rest of the manual and stays on one page. Before you mark it complete, nothing appears at all.

You record it, not the client

It is a record, not a signature. It says what was handed over and when, in your words. It is not a waiver, the client has not agreed to anything by it, and it should not be relied on as consent. If you need a countersigned document, use a tool built for signatures — and put the manual link in it.

Where credentials fit

“Credentials transferred separately” is the honest version of the thing Handover deliberately will not do. The manual records that access changed hands; the access itself goes through a password manager, or the client held it all along. Nothing about the credential is ever stored here. See the no-passwords rule.

Undoing it

Mark it complete too early and Undo clears the date and removes the block from the client’s page entirely. Your ticks stay where they were.

Duplicates and templates

Sign-off never copies. Duplicate a manual and the new one starts unticked and unstamped, because it belongs to one handover on one date. Templates carry none of it either.

Email scripts

Four emails, written for the four moments that decide whether a care plan happens: before the sale, at launch, one month after launch, and at renewal.

You can rewrite any of them, and write your own — in any language, on every plan including free. See Editing and writing scripts below.

Anything in square brackets — [monthly fee and what’s included], [date] — is a blank only you can fill. Everything else is ready to send. Handover is not mentioned anywhere in them; they read as your emails, because they are.

Editing and writing scripts

The four scripts are a starting point, not a script you are stuck with. They go out from your address, with your signature, so they should sound like you. Edit them, or write your own. Nothing here is limited by plan — free accounts can do all of it.

Editing one of the four

Edit on any script opens the subject and body. Save, and that version is yours from then on — the card shows Edited. If we ever improve the original, your version is never overwritten.

Reset to original puts ours back and discards yours. It also means that if we have improved that script since, you get the improvement.

Tokens, and why the editor looks different

Scripts contain tokens — {client_name}, {site_name}, {site_url}, {manual_url}, {support_email} — that fill in from whichever manual you have selected.

A token with nothing to fill it appears to the reader as a readable placeholder in square brackets, never as a blank space.

Writing your own

New script takes a name, a language, a subject and a body. Use it for the emails your studio sends that we don’t ship — a post-launch training note, an annual review, a handover to another agency — and they fill in from the selected manual exactly like the built-in four.

Other languages

We ship the four scripts in English and Spanish only. If you work in another language, write your own set: choose New script, type the language name, and it becomes a choice in the language selector alongside English and Español. There is no limit on how many languages you add.

One warning you may see

If what you type looks like it might contain a credential, an amber note appears under the field. It never blocks you and never refuses a save — it is there because an email is the easiest place in the world to send a password by accident, and Handover’s whole promise is that it holds no secrets. Send credentials through a password manager instead.

Your branding

The manual carries your logo, your brand colour, and your choice of heading and body fonts. Your logo links back to your website. The tab title, the icon and the link preview all belong to you as well, so a client who forwards the link sends something that looks like it came from your studio.

On the free plan a single “Made with Handover” line sits in the footer. Both paid plans remove it. Fonts are self-hosted rather than loaded from Google, so your client’s visitors are not handed to a third party.

Printing & PDFs

Every manual prints properly. Print / Save as PDF at the top of the page produces a clean document: a contents list on its own page, numbered sections, tables that repeat their headers if they run across a page break, and your brand colour preserved.

The file is named for you and the client — your-agency-website-manual-clientname-20260905-1046.pdf — so it files itself sensibly on their computer.

Templates

A template is your agency’s own shape for a manual, saved once and reused. Every studio documents a website slightly differently — a template stops you re-deciding that for every client. Templates are on every paid plan.

Where they live

Settings, then Manage templates. There is no template editing anywhere inside a manual, and that is deliberate — see below.

What a template holds

• Shape — which sections appear, and which built-in fields you never use. If you never record nameservers, stop being asked for them.
• Your own fields — the ones you add to every manual, waiting and empty.
• Your standard maintenance schedule — every task, cadence and owner, ready to go.
• Your retainer scope, how-to blocks and standard accounts — the parts you would otherwise retype.

Two things are never in a template: client details, and admin email addresses. An admin email belongs to one client, and a template that carried one would spread a stale address across every manual you make afterwards.

The fastest way to make one

Build one manual the way your studio works, then use Save as template on that manual’s row. It takes the shape, the schedule, the scope and your custom fields, and leaves the client’s details behind. Designing a template from an empty screen is harder than describing one you have already built.

Using one

When you create a manual, Start from offers Standard or any template you have saved. Pick one and the new manual arrives already shaped, with your schedule in place — usually a third of the way through before you have typed anything.

Editing a template later

The trade is that a manual’s shape is fixed once it exists. If you decide halfway through a project that you do want the nameservers after all, that manual keeps the shape it was born with. Update the template and the next manual gets it.

Two things a template cannot do

It cannot remove the client name, and it cannot remove the emergency contacts. Every manual needs a name, and “who do I call when the site is down” is the section that justifies the whole document.

Reusing a manual

Duplicate copies a manual into a new one and blanks the client-specific parts. Your maintenance schedule, your how-to blocks, your retainer items and your standard accounts all come across; the client name, URLs, dates and admin emails do not. Private client contacts are never copied.

Duplicate copies one manual; a template is a saved shape you can apply to any number of them. Duplicate is the quicker move when you want a near-copy of one particular client’s manual. A template is the better move once you know how your studio documents a site and want every manual to start that way.

English & Spanish

Two separate settings, and they are easy to confuse:

• Your interface language, in Settings. Changes what you see. It does not touch any existing manual.
• The manual’s language, toggled inside each manual’s editor. Decides what language the client reads.

On screen the two are labelled: the toggle inside a manual says Manual language, and the globe in the top bar says Interface language. A new manual inherits your interface language at the moment you create it. Everything generated follows the manual’s own setting — the section headings, the written copy, the maintenance schedule, the date formats and the email scripts.

Common questions