The website after an acquisition

Confirm what you actually bought

The domain, the hosting, the content, the analytics, the business profiles and the review history are separate things, and an acquisition agreement does not always transfer all of them cleanly.

Check the registrar record for the domain and make sure it is transferred into your control rather than left with a previous owner or their web designer. This is the single most common gap and the most expensive to fix later.

Do the same for every account attached to the site. Analytics, search tools, the business profile and any advertising account. Losing access to a profile with years of reviews is a real loss of value.

Measure before you change

Export the pages that get visits, the pages that get search impressions and the pages other sites link to. Those three lists define what you paid for, in search and in an answer engine alike, and what you are not allowed to break.

Most acquired sites have a handful of pages producing nearly everything, and they are rarely the ones anybody expects. Finding out first costs an hour. Finding out afterward costs a year.

Our page on auditing a site covers assembling that picture, and it should happen before any design opinion is allowed near the project.

Keep, merge or retire

Keep the site separate when the acquired business serves a different market, keeps its own name, or has visibility you would lose by folding it into another brand.

Merge when the two businesses become one brand. That means moving the valuable pages onto the surviving site and redirecting every old address to its closest new equivalent, permanently and in one hop.

Retire only when the acquired brand genuinely ends. Even then, redirect rather than delete, because the links pointing at those addresses keep arriving for years afterward.

The handover checklist

This is what we would confirm before the sale completes rather than after. Every item on it is harder to obtain once the previous owner has moved on and stopped answering messages.

• Domain transferred into your own registrar account
• Hosting and site files handed over with credentials
• Analytics and search tool access transferred
• Business profiles and review accounts transferred
• A full list of page addresses exported
• Any content licensed rather than owned identified
• Contact forms redirected to somebody who reads them

The things that break quietly

Contact forms are the worst of them. A form still delivering to a previous owner's inbox means every enquiry from the site you just bought goes to somebody who no longer cares.

Email addresses in the same position. Anything on the site pointing at a person who has left produces silence, and silence is indistinguishable from a working business that ignores customers.

Test every route yourself on the day of handover. Our page on contact forms covers what to check, and this is the check people most often assume somebody else did.

Telling customers

Existing customers of the acquired business need to know what changed and what did not. The same people, the same number, the same work is the reassurance most of them want first.

Publish it as a page rather than only as an announcement that scrolls away. Somebody searching for the old business six months later needs to land on an explanation rather than on a confusing rebrand.

Our page on entity clarity covers connecting the two identities so that the history follows the business rather than being stranded with a name nobody uses.

Improving it later

Leave the site broadly alone for a quarter. You need to see what it actually does across a normal cycle before you can tell which parts of it are load bearing.

Then improve rather than replace. The pages that perform have earned their position, and a rebuild that discards them trades a known asset for an unknown one at exactly the wrong moment.

Our page on rebuilding a site covers the sequence that protects visibility, and it applies identically whether the site was bought or built.