Your Agency Holds Websites of Former Clients. What You Can Do

Most agencies have a few of these: sites built for clients who closed, sold up or simply stopped answering, with domains and hosting still sitting in the agency’s accounts and renewing on the agency’s card. Some of them still get real search traffic and carry links the client earned over the years. They can be sold or leased, but only by whoever has the right to do it, and that is often the former client rather than the agency. Get that settled in writing first. Nothing on this page is legal advice; ask a lawyer to review your contracts.

What your website is likely still worth

Each site is judged on its own merits. A former client’s site may qualify if it is still indexed, gets at least 500 monthly organic visits as estimated by Ahrefs, has two or three strong authority links, and the brand still ranks for some of its own searches. Sites the agency built for a real business that traded for years often meet that bar; brochure sites that never earned traffic usually do not.

Suppose your agency built and hosted a site for a physiotherapy clinic that closed three years ago. Its exercise guides still bring in around 700 visits a month, a regional paper covered the clinic’s opening, and a university sports science department links to one of its articles. The clinic is gone; the guides and the links are not. With the client’s written consent, that site could go into a lease-to-own agreement paying typically roughly $300 to $500 a month until the agreed price is paid in full, or be sold outright. Many of these sites belonged to closed local businesses, and that page explains what the former owner is likely to ask you.

Agencies with several former client sites can have them looked at together. Each still has to qualify on its own, and each needs its own clear right to sell.

What a buyer will check

• Right to sell. Who is the registrant, what does the client contract say, and is there written consent from the former client?
• Content ownership. Who owns the copy, photos and design? Depending on the contract, it may be the client, the agency or a mix.
• Indexation and traffic. Still in Google, with real organic visits. Search Console access helps prove it.
• Links and brand. Earned editorial links, and a business name that still brings up the site.
• Condition. Patched software, no hacked pages, no leftover client data on the server.

A serious buyer will want to see the consent document, not just hear about it. Be wary of any buyer who says they do not need it: our guide to red flags in website buyers lists that among the warning signs.

For outright sales, most domain and website sales close through escrow, so neither side has to trust the other with money or assets first. Escrow is also useful when three parties are involved, because the agreement can state exactly who receives the funds once the transfer is confirmed.

Three risks specific to this situation

1. Selling without the right to sell. Holding the login is not the same as owning the asset. Many agencies registered client domains in their own accounts to save the client the trouble, and contracts often say little about ownership. If the client is the registrant, or the contract gives ownership to the client, the agency cannot sell or lease the site without their agreement. Get written consent, ideally countersigned, that names the domain, the content and how any payment is split. This is not legal advice; have a lawyer review it.

2. A former client in insolvency. If the client’s company went into administration or liquidation, the insolvency practitioner usually controls its remaining assets, which may include the domain. Contact them rather than the former directors. Our guide on selling a website when the company is insolvent explains how that works and why speed matters before the next renewal.

3. Leftover client data and accounts. Old servers may hold contact form submissions, customer records or email accounts. These should not be part of any deal. Delete or return data according to your obligations and your contract, and remove client email accounts before transfer. Depending on the contract and the country, the agency may have handled that data on the client’s behalf, which brings its own duties. This is general information, not legal advice; ask a qualified adviser about your data protection duties.

What to do this month

1. List every former client domain you hold, with registrant name, registrar and expiry date.
2. Check each client contract for ownership terms, and flag sites where ownership is unclear.
3. Contact former clients (or their liquidators) to ask whether they want the site sold or leased, and get written consent before any next step.
4. Keep qualifying sites renewed and online, with content intact, while you sort out consent.
5. Run promising sites through our free website value check to see which ones are worth the conversation.

Your options

The monthly route pays a higher total than our cash offer. For agencies, leasing can also turn an annual renewal cost into a shared monthly payment, if the former client agrees. If the site is the agency’s own (for example, a content project you built and own outright), those consent questions fall away, though the same quality bar applies.

Whatever route you take, everything goes into a written agreement before any transfer, and the handover follows the usual steps in how a website transfer works. Our methodology page lists what we look at, and how we evaluate a site in detail is explained on the call.

What to do next

• Audit which former client domains you hold and who owns each one.
• Get written consent from the former client before offering any site.
• Send us the sites for a free valuation once consent is in place, and we will tell you which ones fit.