Outsourcing web development from the UK: a practical checklist

Many UK businesses work with web development teams in other countries to reach skills and capacity they cannot find locally. The projects that go well usually have the same things in common: a clear scope, agreed working hours, a written contract, the right data protection paperwork and accounts that stay in the client's name. This checklist covers each of those points for a UK business hiring an offshore or nearshore team. The sections on contracts and data protection are general information, not legal advice; ask a UK solicitor to review any significant contract.

What should you define before you contact suppliers?

A written brief makes proposals easier to compare and misunderstandings less likely. Before you approach anyone, set out:

• The goal: what the website must achieve for the business, such as more enquiries, online sales or fewer support calls.
• The first release: the pages and features that must be ready at launch, and those that can follow.
• Constraints: the platform, existing systems to connect to, hosting, languages and any rules your sector follows.
• Content: who writes the copy, supplies the images and moves content from the old site.
• Decision-maker: the person on your side who answers questions, approves designs and accepts the work.

Ask each supplier for a written proposal that lists the scope, milestones, assumptions and what is not included.

How do you handle the time difference?

The UK uses Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in winter and British Summer Time (BST), one hour ahead, from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. India does not change its clocks, so India is 5½ hours ahead of the UK in winter and 4½ hours ahead in summer. A 9:30 meeting in the UK is 14:00 in India in summer and 15:00 in winter.

That gives a natural overlap across the UK morning. Many teams use it for calls and quick questions, and use the rest of the day for focused work. Agree the overlap hours in writing, and remember that the overlap shifts by an hour when UK clocks change. Check public holidays in both countries when you set milestone dates.

What communication cadence works?

Distance is manageable when communication follows a routine:

• a short regular check-in during the overlap hours, often daily or twice a week;
• a demo of finished work at the end of every sprint or milestone;
• one shared project board for tasks, questions and decisions, rather than scattered emails and chats;
• written notes after every call, so decisions do not depend on memory;
• a named contact on each side, and an agreed way to escalate a problem.

What should the contract cover?

Read the contract carefully and ask a solicitor to review it if the project is significant. Make sure it covers:

• Intellectual property: GOV.UK's guidance explains that a contractor working under a contract for services will usually keep copyright in what they create unless a contract says otherwise. Include a written assignment to your business of the code, designs and content created for you, and say when it takes effect, for example on payment.
• Third-party and open-source components: a list of the themes, plugins, libraries and fonts used, and the licence each one comes with.
• Confidentiality: a non-disclosure agreement signed before you share sensitive details.
• Payment milestones: each payment linked to a deliverable that you have reviewed and accepted.
• Changes: how new requests are estimated, approved and added to the plan.
• Warranty and support: how bugs found after launch are handled, and for how long.
• Governing law: which country's law applies and where disputes would be resolved.
• Termination: what happens to the work, the code and your data if either side ends the contract.

What does UK GDPR require if the supplier handles personal data?

If the team will see customer records, form submissions, orders or a copy of a live database, your business is usually the controller and the supplier is a processor. The UK GDPR requires a written contract between you, and the ICO's guidance lists what it must include, such as:

• processing only on your documented instructions;
• a duty of confidentiality for everyone who handles the data;
• appropriate security measures;
• using sub-processors only with your authorisation;
• helping you with people's rights requests and with breaches;
• deleting or returning the data at the end of the contract;
• allowing audits and inspections.

Sending personal data to, or making it accessible to, a separate organisation outside the UK can also be a restricted transfer; the ICO's guidance says this includes letting a team abroad view data on your systems without sending a copy. The ICO lists the countries covered by UK adequacy regulations; India is not one of them. For a country without adequacy regulations, the usual safeguards are the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, together with a transfer risk assessment. The ICO says the EU clauses are not valid on their own for UK transfers, and that it plans to update the IDTA and the Addendum during 2026, so organisations should keep using the current versions until then. The ICO's interactive tool helps you check whether the transfer rules apply.

The simplest protection is to share less: build and test with sample or anonymised data, and give the team access to live personal data only when a task genuinely needs it.

Who should own the code, repositories and accounts?

Your business should own every account, and the supplier should be given access to it:

• keep the code in a repository owned by your organisation, such as GitHub or GitLab, and add the team as members;
• register the domain, hosting, email, analytics and any cloud services in your company's name and with your billing details;
• give each person their own login with only the access they need, and turn on multi-factor authentication;
• share passwords through a password manager, never by email or chat;
• remove access promptly when someone leaves the project.

How should testing and acceptance work?

Agree the definition of "done" before work starts: which browsers and devices are tested, how accessibility and page speed are checked, who reviews the code and where it is documented. Ask for a staging site where you can try every change before it goes live. Write acceptance criteria for each milestone, set a period for you to review the work, and agree how bugs are prioritised. Reviewing at every milestone, rather than only at the end, keeps problems small.

What should handover and support include?

Plan the end of the project at the beginning. A good handover gives you up-to-date code in your repository, documentation of how to build and deploy the site, a list of every third-party service and plugin, admin logins transferred to your team, and a recorded walkthrough of how to edit content. Agree in writing what support looks like after launch: who fixes problems, how quickly, and how updates and security patches are applied. Finally, review who still has access and remove anyone who no longer needs it.

For a fuller version of this checklist for any country, read our guide to hiring an offshore development team. Dzimark works with UK businesses remotely from our head office in India; see our work for UK businesses and our website development service, or tell us about your project.

Sources

• ICO: What needs to be included in the contract?
• ICO: International transfers
• ICO: A brief guide to international transfers
• ICO: Is the restricted transfer covered by adequacy regulations?
• ICO: What are standard data protection clauses (the UK IDTA and the Addendum)?
• GOV.UK: Ownership of copyright works
• GOV.UK: When do the clocks change?