Client onboarding questionnaire
Questions to send a new web design client before the discovery call: the business, goals, existing accounts, content and brand, budget and who maintains the site after launch.
Free template for designers
Maintenance agreement outline
The sections a solid website maintenance agreement covers, with numbers where they belong. An outline, not legal advice.
Read this first
This outline helps you plan an agreement. It is not legal advice and not a contract. Have a lawyer licensed where you work draft or review the final version.
Scope
- Parties, start date, term, renewal terms, and the sites covered, by address.
- Included: updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security scans, [X] support hours a month.
- Excluded: redesigns, new features, content entry, third-party outages, client-made breakage.
- Unused hours: roll over [up to X] or expire monthly.
Service levels
- Response times as numbers: site down within [X] hours, normal requests within [X] business days.
- Working hours and time zone. How after-hours emergencies are raised and billed.
- Updates: how often, tested on staging first, and rollback if one breaks the site.
- Backups: frequency, retention, storage location, who restores, restores included.
- Security incidents: cleanup included or billed, and who notifies whom.
Responsibilities
- Hosting: who holds the account, who pays, who deals with the host.
- Third-party licenses: who buys and renews them, and who owns them at the end.
- Client duties: timely approvals, secure logins, no new plugins or host changes without notice.
Money and exit
- Fees, billing date, late fees, and notice required for price changes.
- Price each tier from your real costs with the care plan calculator (/design-field-kit/care-plan-calculator/) and show clients the choices with the care plan tier sheet (/client-survival-kit/care-plan-tier-sheet/), both on webdesignsurvivalist.com.
- Extra work: hourly rate, approved in writing before it starts.
- Termination: notice period, ending for cause, and what happens to prepaid fees.
- Handover: logins, latest backup, license transfers, and a deadline to complete it.
- Limitation of liability, indemnity, governing law: [for your lawyer to draft].
More templates
The rest of the kit
Incident log and post-incident report
A running incident log to fill in while a site is down or hacked, plus a short post-incident report for the client: timeline, impact, cause, fix and the changes that stop a repeat.
Vulnerability report replies
Two replies for unsolicited security reports: a polite decline for beg bounty emails, and a professional acknowledgement for a genuine, detailed disclosure.
Care plan tier sheet
Turn your care plan prices into tiers a client can compare: what each tier includes, task credits, add-ons and who may buy them, backups and response times.
Scope creep script and change request
What to say when a client asks for “one small thing” outside the project, plus a change request form with real fields.
Client access request email
A ready-to-send email asking a client (or a previous developer) for every login and account you need before you start, with safer ways to share each one.