How to switch dealership website providers

What to check before you decide

Protect the things that make money. Forms, click-to-call, chat, credit applications, trade tools and inventory feeds must work on launch day.

Ask the vendor to put that in writing, and test every one from a phone. Confirm that leads post into the CRM with the right source, and that the call numbers match the ones your ads use.

Check speed and mobile use. Most dealership traffic arrives on phones, so load the new site on a mid-range phone on a cellular connection before launch. Ask for the speed report from the vendor's own test.

Finally, read the contract you are leaving. Find the notice period, any early termination fee and what happens to content you wrote. Time the launch so the old site stays live until the new one is tested, and keep redirects in place for at least a year.

Schedule a post-launch review at two weeks and again at ninety days. Compare organic traffic, top landing pages, leads per hundred visits and calls against the last three months on the old site.

Fix lost redirects and missing pages the same week. Small drops in the first month are normal; large ones point to something missed.

Keep a list of everything the old provider did for you without being asked, from resizing photos and pushing inventory feeds to adding tracking scripts and updating legal pages, because the new provider will do only what the contract says and those small chores tend to vanish unnoticed.