How to Switch Web Design Agencies in Canada (2026)

By Cody Wise, Founder, Wise Media. Published 5 September 2026.

To switch web design agencies in Canada, take control of the assets before you give notice: your .ca domain, hosting, DNS, the WordPress admin, the commercial plugin licences, and owner-level access to Google Analytics, Search Console, Business Profile and Ads. Then get a written copyright assignment, because under Canadian law an agency owns what it built unless it signs that right over to you.

Summary

Paying the invoice does not transfer copyright. Under the Copyright Act, the author is the first owner and no assignment is valid unless it is in writing and signed.
A registrar cannot hold your .ca domain over unpaid bills. CIRA’s rules prohibit it outright, and your registrar must hand over the authorization code within five calendar days.
The 60-day lock is real. A .ca domain cannot change registrar within 60 days of registration or of a previous transfer, so check the clock before you plan a cutover date.
Commercial plugin licences are the sleeper risk. If the agency bought Elementor Pro, ACF Pro or Avada under its own account, your site stops receiving updates the moment the relationship ends. That includes security updates.
Google Analytics history moves once and only one way. Move the property. Do not start a fresh one, because reporting data is moved, never copied.
Google Business Profile has a three-day clock. If the outgoing agency ignores an access request, you may get the option to claim the profile after three days. May, not will.
Do the inventory before the conversation. Every leverage point in this article is easier to use while the relationship is still cordial.

The asset audit is an evening of quiet work. Do it before you give notice, not after.

What do you actually own when you leave an agency?
The nine assets to inventory before you say anything
How do you move a .ca domain away from an agency?
Who owns the plugin licences on your website?
How do you transfer Google properties without losing history?
Your email list, CASL, and the records that have to come with it
The switch, step by step
Common mistakes when changing web design agencies
What it costs and how long it takes
Frequently asked questions

What Do You Actually Own When You Leave an Agency?

Less than you think, and that is not a scare tactic. It is the default position of Canadian copyright law.

The Copyright Act default nobody explains at kickoff

Section 13(1) of the Copyright Act says the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in it. Section 13(4) says no assignment or grant is valid “unless it is in writing signed by the owner of the right in respect of which the assignment or grant is made, or by the owner’s duly authorized agent.” (Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, s.13)

There is an exception at s.13(3) for work made by an employee in the course of employment. An agency is not your employee. An agency is a contractor engaged under a contract for services, so the exception does not reach it. Which means the design files, the custom theme, the photography, the copy and the illustrations belong to whoever made them until a signed document says otherwise.

Most Canadian small businesses have never seen that document. They have an invoice marked paid and an assumption.

Two practical consequences. First, ask for a signed assignment now, while you are still a paying client, not after you have told them you are leaving. Second, moral rights sit separately at s.14.1 and cannot be assigned, only waived, so a proper assignment clause deals with both.

None of this is legal advice. If the site is central to your revenue, have a Canadian lawyer read the agreement.

What almost always is yours anyway

Your data. Your customer list, your form submissions, your Search Console history, your Google Business Profile reviews, your ad account performance. Content you wrote or paid a separate writer for under an assignment. Your trade marks and your business name. The domain, provided it is registered to you rather than to the agency, which is exactly the thing to check first.

Under section 13 of the Copyright Act, the signature on a written assignment is what moves ownership. The invoice does not.

The Nine Assets to Inventory Before You Say Anything

Do this quietly, in an afternoon, before you open the conversation. You are not being sneaky. You are finding out what you are negotiating with.

Asset	What to confirm	Where to look
Domain registration	Registrant is your legal entity, not the agency	CIRA WHOIS, or your registrar dashboard
DNS control	You can log in and edit records	Registrar or Cloudflare account
Hosting	Account is in your name and billed to your card	Host billing portal
WordPress	You hold an Administrator account	/wp-admin/users.php
Plugin and theme licences	Which are agency-owned, and their renewal dates	Plugin settings pages, licence tabs
Google Analytics	You have Administrator at account level	GA4 Admin, Account Access Management
Search Console	You are a verified owner with your own token	Settings, Users and permissions
Google Business Profile	You are the primary owner	Profile settings, Managers
Google Ads and Meta	You can unlink the manager account	Ads Admin, Access and security

If a row comes back “the agency has it,” that is not a crisis. It is a line item for the exit conversation. What causes damage is discovering it three days into a migration with a launch date already promised.

A handover is an inventory before it is a migration. Nine assets, listed, before any conversation starts.

How Do You Move a .ca Domain Away From an Agency?

You request an authorization code from the current registrar, hand it to your new registrar, and the change happens immediately with no pending period. CIRA’s rules give you two protections that most Canadian business owners have never been told about.

The rule that ends the hostage conversation

CIRA’s General Registration Rules state that “under no circumstances may a Registrar of Record transfer a Domain Name Registration, or change the Registrant associated with a Domain Name Registration due to non-payment by a Registrant of any amounts owed to a Registrar or other third party.” (CIRA General Registration Rules)

The same rules cap the stalling: “The Registrar of Record must provide the authorization code within five calendar days of the Registrant’s request, and must remove any Registrar locks on the domain name.”

Note the word Registrant. Those protections run to the person or company the domain is registered to. They do nothing for you if the agency put its own name in that field, which is the single most consequential detail on this entire page.

CIRA also publishes an escalation route. Request the code from the administrative contact email listed on the domain profile, and if it does not arrive within five days, take it to CIRA directly. (CIRA, how to transfer domains)

The 60-day lock, and why it decides your timeline

No change of registrar can occur within 60 days of the registration date or of a previous change of registrar. Register or transfer a .ca on the 1st and you cannot move it again until roughly the 61st day. Some registrar blogs say 65 days. CIRA’s own rules say 60. Plan against 60 and confirm in your registrar dashboard.

Registrar transfer and registrant transfer are two different jobs

Changing where the domain is registered is a registrar transfer, done with an authorization code. Changing who it is registered to is a registrant transfer, done as a domain update request through the current registrar. The incoming registrant has to already be a CIRA Registrant and has to meet the Canadian Presence Requirements. If you are doing both at once, CIRA’s rules require you to comply with the change of registrar section as well.

One more trap. An ordinary contact-details edit cannot change the Registrant name. That is a separate transaction, and a legal name change needs written notice and documentary evidence to CIRA.

If your domain is a .com instead

Different rules, and the order of operations flips. ICANN’s Transfer Policy says the registrar “must not refuse to remove the ClientTransferProhibited status or release an AuthInfo Code to the Registered Name Holder solely because there is a dispute between the Registered Name Holder and the Registrar over payment.” It also imposes a 60-day inter-registrar transfer lock following a Change of Registrant, and it explicitly advises that if the goal is to move registrars, you should request the inter-registrar transfer before the change of registrant to avoid triggering that lock. (ICANN Transfer Policy)

So: on a .com, move the registrar first, then change the owner. On a .ca, the two can run together. Getting that backwards on a .com costs you sixty days.

Who Owns the Plugin Licences on Your Website?

This is the section that separates a real handover from a friendly one, and it is the one nobody writes about. Commercial WordPress plugins and themes are licensed to an account, not to a website. When the agency’s account stops paying, the site keeps working and stops updating.

In an ordinary month that is an inconvenience. In a month like August 2026, when a run of unauthenticated critical flaws landed across the premium builder and forms layer, an unpatchable site is a genuine liability. We wrote the owner’s version of that in our August 2026 WordPress vulnerability runbook and the Elementor Pro CVE-2026-32475 runbook. The common thread in both: no host can push an update to a commercially licensed plugin. The licence holder has to.

Product	What lapsing costs you	Can it be handed over?
Elementor Pro	“You won’t get new releases or security updates,” Pro widgets and features unavailable, kits and templates disabled, support ends. The site stays online.	Not by conveying the licence. Elementor’s terms forbid sale, lease, assignment or transfer of a licence. Buy your own and connect it.
ACF Pro	No updates and no Pro features. You cannot create new Pro fields, though existing field data keeps displaying on the front end.	Yes. Advanced Custom Fields documents transfer as “updating the account details at your store account page.”
WP Rocket	Plugin keeps working, but cloud features stop 15 days after expiry, along with updates, Remove Unused CSS and dynamic exclusions.	Yes. WP Rocket documents an owner-to-owner transfer through support, and explicitly covers “finishing a relationship with your developer, designer, or an agency.”
Avada and other ThemeForest items	Updates continue under Envato’s item support policy, but a licence flagged for use on multiple live sites can be locked, which kills automatic updates and new registrations.	Partly. The ThemeForest Regular Licence contemplates transferring one End Product to a client, but Envato account ownership itself does not move.

Sources: Elementor FAQ and terms of service, ACF documentation, WP Rocket switching your licence, ThemeForest Regular Licence.

The practical rule: budget to re-buy the licences you cannot transfer, and treat that as a cost of the switch rather than a surprise. A typical WordPress business site carries somewhere between $150 and $600 CAD a year of commercial licences. Ask the incoming agency to price it explicitly rather than absorb it invisibly, which is the same discipline we apply to a WordPress maintenance plan.

Note one nuance in that table. Removing a domain from a WP Rocket account does not stop the old site from using the licence while the plugin is still active, so a clean exit means changing the key, not just deleting a row in someone’s dashboard.

Commercial plugin licences are account-bound, not site-bound. When the account stops paying, the update button dies.

How Do You Transfer Google Properties Without Losing History?

Each of the four Google properties behaves differently. Two keep their history without you doing anything, one keeps it only if you move rather than rebuild, and one has a clock on it.

Google Analytics 4: move the property, do not start a new one

GA4 has no “primary owner” to hand over. Control is a permissions question. The real transfer mechanism is Google’s Move a property feature, and Google frames it for precisely this case: “You might be reorganizing after a merger, after an internal restructuring, or after hiring a new agency.”

You need Administrator and Editor roles on both the source and destination accounts. The move carries the tag ID, settings, data streams and reporting data. Because the tag ID does not change, you do not have to re-tag the site. The key sentence: “All reporting data associated with a property is moved (not copied).” (Google Analytics Help, move a property)

Which is why the shortcut people reach for is the expensive one. Spinning up a fresh property in your own account and re-tagging takes ten minutes and quietly abandons every year of history you have. Data Import will not fix it afterwards, because imported data is not joined with data Analytics has already processed.

Search Console: your history is already safe, but check the tokens

Search Console data belongs to the property, not the user. Google is unusually direct about it: “Data for the property will continue to be collected, but nobody will have access to it until someone verifies ownership of the property.”

So verify yourself, ideally by DNS, which is the only method valid for a Domain property and the one you can do without the agency’s cooperation. Then remove the outgoing agency’s verification token, not just its user account. Google’s warning: “As long as a user’s verification token remains for a property, a deleted owner can re-verify ownership of the property.” Check the Unused ownership tokens list. (Search Console Help, managing owners and users)

Google Business Profile: the one with a clock

Only the primary owner can transfer primary ownership, and only to someone already an owner or manager. Transferring rather than recreating is what protects your reviews, which Google states plainly: “This ensures all of your business info, like reviews, are maintained.”

Two timing details. A newly added owner or manager waits seven days before they can remove other owners or transfer primary ownership. And if the agency simply does not respond, the Request access flow notifies the current owner, who “has 3 days to respond,” after which you “may have the option to claim the profile.” Google is careful with that wording, and so should you be: “The option to claim a profile isn’t always available.” Service-area businesses cannot use the self-serve request flow at all and have to go through support. (Google Business Profile Help, request ownership)

Google Ads: unlink carefully or your ads stop

The good news is that unlinking a manager account does not cost you campaign history. The trap is billing. Google states it directly: “If the Ads account is on monthly invoicing, and the manager account to be unlinked is the paying manager, the account will stop serving after you unlink it.” Change the billing setup first. Shared remarketing lists also stop populating and cross-account conversion tracking stops recording new clicks. (Google Ads Help, unlink a manager account)

Also worth knowing which side of the fork you are on: if the manager created your account, the manager owns it. If the manager linked an existing account, it does not own it by default, and your Admin-level user can unlink at will.

Your Email List, CASL, and the Records That Have to Come With It

Exporting a CSV of addresses is not moving your list. Under CASL, “the onus of proving consent, be it express or implied, is on the person who claims they have consent.” You are the sender. The burden is yours whether or not the agency kept good records.

The CRTC says consent records should include “the electronic address, the date and the method that consent was received,” and recommends retaining consent logs, evidence of express consent, and “all contemporaneous unsubscribe requests and resulting actions.” Unsubscribes must be honoured within 10 business days regardless of consent type. (CRTC, Guidance on Implied Consent)

So your export request has four parts, not one: the addresses, the consent source and date for each, the method of consent, and the full suppression list. Miss the fourth and your first campaign on the new platform emails people who already opted out.

Also remember that implied consent expires. A business relationship gives you two years from a purchase or contract and six months from an inquiry. If the timestamps do not come across, you cannot prove which contacts are still live.

The Switch, Step by Step

Run the nine-asset inventory. Quietly, before any conversation. You need to know what you hold and what you are asking for.
Read your contract. Notice period, auto-renewal date, ownership and assignment clauses, and what happens to hosting on termination. In Alberta there is no statute prescribing notice for a commercial service agreement, so the contract is the rule.
Secure the domain first. Confirm the Registrant, request the authorization code, and check whether you are inside the 60-day lock.
Get your own Administrator accounts. WordPress, hosting, GA4, Search Console, Business Profile, Ads. Yours, on your own email address, on a domain you control.
Ask for the copyright assignment in writing. Bundle it with the offboarding conversation, not after it.
Take a full backup before anything moves. Files and database, downloaded locally, not just a snapshot living on the outgoing agency’s host.
Give notice in writing, with a proposed offboarding date and an itemised list of what you are asking to receive.
Migrate on a staging site, test, then cut over DNS. Never point production DNS at a site you have not loaded yourself.
Change every credential the outgoing agency ever held, including hosting SFTP, database users and any API keys.
Remove the old verification tokens and unlink the manager accounts, in that order, once you have confirmed your own access works.

If the new build is a redesign rather than a lift and shift, the SEO side has its own checklist, which we covered in website redesign without losing SEO traffic.

Take a full local backup before anything moves. A snapshot living on the outgoing agency’s host is not a backup.

Common Mistakes When Changing Web Design Agencies

Giving notice before doing the inventory. Every conversation is easier while you are still a client in good standing.
Assuming the invoice bought the copyright. It did not. Only a signed assignment does.
Starting a fresh GA4 property because it is faster. Ten minutes saved, years of history gone.
Creating a duplicate Google Business Profile instead of transferring the existing one. You lose the reviews and you create a duplicate-listing problem on top.
Unlinking a Google Ads manager that is the paying manager. Ads stop serving the same day.
Removing a Search Console user without removing the verification token. They can re-verify.
Exporting email addresses without consent metadata. You inherit the list and none of the proof.
Letting the new agency register the domain in its own name. You are about to repeat the exact problem you are solving.
Cutting over DNS on a Friday. Propagation plus a weekend plus nobody on call.
Skipping the licence audit. The site looks fine for a month, then a critical CVE lands and the update button is dead.

What It Costs and How Long It Takes

A clean handover of an existing site, where you are keeping the build and only changing who maintains it, is mostly labour: an access audit, a licence rebuild, a backup, a migration to your own hosting, and a documentation pass. In the Canadian market that lands in the low four figures CAD for a straightforward brochure site and climbs with WooCommerce, memberships, custom plugins or a bilingual build.

Add the licence line. Somewhere between $150 and $600 CAD a year for a typical business site, more if the build leans on several premium plugins. Add hosting in your own name. If you are rebuilding rather than migrating, our Canadian website cost guide covers the ranges.

Timeline, assuming cooperation: about two to three weeks. One week for the inventory, the notice and the domain code, one week for migration and testing, and a few days of overlap after cutover. Assuming no cooperation, budget four to six weeks and expect the domain and the Business Profile to be the slow parts, because both have waiting periods you cannot shorten.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can my web design agency hold my domain because I owe them money?

Not through the registrar. CIRA’s rules say that under no circumstances may a Registrar of Record transfer a registration or change the Registrant due to non-payment by the Registrant of amounts owed to a registrar or other third party. ICANN’s Transfer Policy has an equivalent rule for .com and other gTLDs. The catch is that these protect the Registrant, so if the agency is listed as the Registrant rather than you, this is a contract dispute rather than a registrar one.

Do I own my website if I paid for it?

You own the domain and your data. You do not automatically own the copyright in the design and code. Under s.13 of the Copyright Act the author is first owner, and an assignment is only valid in writing and signed. Ask for that assignment while the relationship is healthy. This is general information, not legal advice.

Will I lose my Google Analytics data if I switch agencies?

Only if you start a new property instead of moving the existing one. Google’s Move a property feature carries the tag ID, settings, data streams and reporting data across accounts, and states that reporting data is moved rather than copied. You need Administrator and Editor on both accounts, and a few conditions block it, including a different Google Marketing Platform organization or an active Ad Manager link.

How long does a .ca domain transfer take?

The change itself is immediate once the new registrar submits it, with no pending period, which is a real difference from gTLDs. The waiting is upstream: your current registrar has up to five calendar days to release the authorization code, and no transfer at all is possible within 60 days of registration or of a previous transfer.

What happens to my Elementor Pro licence when I leave the agency?

If the licence sits in the agency’s account, it leaves with them. Elementor’s terms do not allow a licence to be sold, leased, assigned or transferred, so the answer is to buy your own subscription and connect the site to it. Until you do, the site stays online but stops receiving releases and security updates and the Pro widgets become unavailable.

Should I tell my current agency before I find a new one?

Do the asset inventory first, line up the incoming team second, then give notice. That order is not about being adversarial. It is about not being in the position of asking for cooperation on a migration you have not planned yet, from a firm that has already been told it is being replaced.

The Bottom Line

Switching agencies is rarely a technical problem. It is an ownership problem that shows up as a technical problem. Every real obstacle in this article comes from a decision made at the start of the last relationship: whose name went on the domain, whose account bought the licences, whose email verified Search Console. Fix those on the way in this time, and the next switch is a two-week job instead of a six-week negotiation.

If you would rather someone ran the audit and the migration for you, that is what our website packages and ongoing growth packages are built around, with every asset registered in your name from day one. Start with the intake form and we will tell you what you actually own before you tell anyone you are leaving.

This article is general information about Canadian business and technical practice, not legal advice. Verify contract and copyright questions with a qualified Canadian lawyer.

How to Switch Web Design Agencies in Canada: The 2026 Handover Checklist