What an agency needs from you before week one

Registrar login, because DNS cannot be cut over without it. Hosting access, because the old site cannot be crawled or exported. Analytics access, because no baseline means no before. Search Console access, because the indexing report is the launch check. A service list with prices or bands, because the page list is priced from it. Cities you can evidence, because city pages need evidence rather than ambition. Photographs of real work, which is the biggest credibility lever. Reviews and credentials, because proof pages need material. And one decision-maker who can approve copy, because two opinions with no tiebreak costs a week per round.

Items one to four are the schedule risk. In our experience they are held by a previous agency, a former employee, or an email address nobody can access. Start them on day one, because the recovery path for a lost registrar login is measured in days of support tickets rather than minutes.

Item one has a second purpose. While you are in the registrar, check whose name is in the registrant field. That is a thing to discover now rather than at launch.

Copy. If you are writing it, you are doing the expensive part of the job. Supply the facts; the writing is what you are buying.

A design direction, because a layout chosen before the page list is a layout chosen before anyone knows what the site has to say. A sitemap you drew, because the page list comes out of the service list and the inspection. And a competitor you want to look like, which is useful as data and not as a brief.

What a good agency should supply in return, in week one: the inspection findings exported, and a page list with a price on it. If week one produces design concepts instead, the sequence is wrong.