Do you actually own your website?
It sounds like a daft question. But a surprising number of small business owners discover, usually at the worst possible moment, that they don’t actually own the thing they paid for. Here’s how that happens — and how to make sure it never happens to you.
Here’s a scenario we see all the time. A business owner wants to move their website, or update it, or take it to a new designer. They get in touch, full of good intentions — and then the awkward discovery: they don’t have the login. Or the designer who built it has vanished. Or the platform they built it on won’t let them leave without losing everything.
You paid for the website. You assume you own it. But “owning a website” is made up of several different things, and it’s perfectly possible to have paid for all of them and still control none of them. Let’s untangle it.
Your domain name
This is the single most important piece. Your domain — yourbusiness.co.uk — is your address on the internet. If you don’t control the registrar account it’s registered in, you don’t control your domain. Many a business has discovered too late that their domain was registered in their original designer’s name, or their old agency’s account. When that designer disappears, the domain goes with them — and getting it back is a nightmare.
The rule: your domain should be registered in an account you control, with your name and your email on it. Anyone who registers it for you should hand over the account or make you the owner. No exceptions.
The design and the code
If a designer builds you a custom website, you should own the design and the code that runs it. That means the files — the HTML, CSS, images and everything that makes the site work — are yours. You should be able to take them to anyone.
Where this goes wrong is with “website builders” — the Wix, Squarespace, Shopify-type platforms. You don’t own the site you build there; you rent the ability to use their platform. Cancel the subscription and the site vanishes. You can’t pick it up and put it somewhere else. For some businesses that’s an acceptable trade-off; for many, it’s a costly surprise years later.
Your content and your data
The words, the photos, the customer enquiries your form collects — that’s all yours. But again, it can quietly end up locked inside a platform or a designer’s system you can’t access. If your contact form sends enquiries to a dashboard you can’t log into, do you really have those enquiries?
The hosting and the access
Someone hosts your site — the server it lives on. You don’t need to run the server yourself, but you should know where it is, who controls it, and how to get access if you need it. A designer who’s the only person with the keys is a single point of failure.
How to check where you stand
- Can you log into your domain registrar? If not, that’s problem number one.
- Do you have the files/code for your website? Or is it locked inside a platform you rent?
- Do you control your hosting account? Or does someone else hold the keys?
- If your designer vanished tomorrow, could you carry on? If the answer’s no, you have a problem.
The honest answer
Owning your website shouldn’t be complicated, but it’s astonishing how often it’s quietly given away. A good designer sets you up to own everything from day one — your domain in your name, the code handed to you, hosting you control, content that’s yours. That’s not a premium feature. It’s how it should work by default.
If you’re not sure whether you own your site, find out before you need to. The worst time to discover you don’t control your own website is when you actually need to.
Want a website you fully own and control — no lock-in, no surprises? See our services or get a free homepage demo.
Want a website you actually own?
No lock-in, no surprises. You own the domain, the design, the content and the code. See a free demo first.