What should a web design contract include?

One, copyright assignment, effective on final payment and naming the deliverables. Two, the domain: registrant is you, from day one. Three, accounts — hosting, DNS, repository, analytics, Search Console — in your name. Four, scope as a quantity: page count and rate, not a project adjective. Five, revisions: a number, per page or per phase. Six, acceptance criteria, measurable. Seven, migration: who maps old URLs to new, and when. Eight, termination: what is delivered, in what format, within how many days. Nine, content ownership: your copy, photos and data return with you.

Clauses one to three are the ownership triad, and the default on each runs against you unless the contract says otherwise. The sources are 17 USC 101, the Copyright Office's Circular 30, and ICANN's Registrant Rights and Responsibilities.

"Professional quality" is unenforceable. Numbers are not.

Core Web Vitals: LCP 2.5s or less, INP 200ms or less, CLS 0.1 or less at the 75th percentile. Specify field data after 28 days of real traffic, not a lab score at handover. With the fallback written in: a low-traffic local site often has no CrUX field data at all, so the clause should accept lab data at the same thresholds, labeled as lab, until field data exists.

Indexation, verified in Search Console's page indexing report: every page in the sitemap either indexed or excluded for a stated and agreed reason.

Redirects, per Google's site move guidance: every old URL resolves to its equivalent, with the map delivered as a file.

Our own version of clause 6, so this is not advice we exempt ourselves from: the monthly plan does not start until the launch build is indexed by Google, or day 45 — whichever comes first.

This is how the statute and the policies read; it is not legal advice, and a contract question is a question for a lawyer.