If there’s lots of custom coding, it’s going to make it a whole lot harder.

I challenge you to ask your current designer or developer how hard it would be to take your site (and theme and plugins and hosting) and go to another developer or designer.

Let’s make a little checklist:

  1. Theme customizations: are there so many theme customizations that only the developer knows what’s what? Did they at least document what they did?
  2. Plugin tweaking: are there plugins that they have altered? Will updates to those plugins break the plugins or the site?
  3. Custom post types: you might not know what these are, but your developers will. Are they being used? Can they easily transfer between themes?
  4. Hosting: is it easily transferrable or are you actually on your developer’s own hosting plan which doesn’t give you direct access?
  5. Domain: you really want this in your own name. It is in your name, right? You can check here: WHOIS.
  6. Anything else we should know? If you walked away, are there any other “surprises” that you’d rather know about sooner than later?

Pretend you wanted to leave your designer or developer today. It might not be a bad idea to get a feel for how that process would go before it actually is going to happen.