Do you own your website? What to check before you hire anyone

Who owns your website comes down to four things: the domain, the hosting account, the code, and the analytics property. If all four sit in accounts registered to you, you own your website. If any of them sits in your designer's accounts, then to that extent your designer owns it, regardless of what you paid. Before you hire anyone, agree in writing that all four will be yours, and check it before you make the final payment.

Who owns your website when someone else builds it?

Whoever controls the accounts owns the website in every way that matters. Paying for the build does not automatically transfer anything. The practical test is simple: if your designer disappeared tomorrow, could you log in and take everything with you? Run that test against the domain registrar, the hosting account, the code repository, and the analytics property. Anything you cannot reach on your own is not really yours.

I build websites for small businesses, and the pattern I see is consistent. The business owner assumes ownership follows payment, the same way it does when you buy a van. The web industry does not work that way by default. A lot of designers and agencies register the domain themselves, host the site on their own account, and keep the code where the client cannot see it. Sometimes that is deliberate lock-in. More often it is just the path of least resistance: it is quicker for the designer to use their own accounts than to walk a client through creating four new ones.

Either way, the result is the same. The client owns a bill, and the designer owns a website.

Check one: is the domain registered to you?

The domain is the one to get right first, because it is the hardest to recover and the most damaging to lose. Your domain is your address on the internet. Your email probably runs on it. Every business card, Google listing, and backlink points at it.

For policy purposes, the legal owner of a domain is the registrant named on the registration. ICANN, the body that oversees the domain system, is clear on this. If your designer registered the domain in their own name, your designer is the registrant, and that means your designer owns your address.

Getting a domain back from a designer's name is not a form you fill in once. Changing the registrant triggers ICANN's 60-day transfer lock, which blocks moving the domain to a different registrar for 60 days after the change. The same lock applies after an initial registration or a previous transfer. No registrar can override it, though some let you opt out before the registrant change is made, not after. The lock only blocks registrar transfers, so DNS changes and renewals still work during it, but if the relationship has gone sour, two months is a long time to depend on someone's goodwill.

What to do instead: create your own account with a registrar before the project starts, register the domain yourself (it takes about ten minutes), and give your designer the DNS access they need. If a designer insists on registering it for you, ask them to name you as the registrant and to put the domain in an account you control. If they resist that, it tells you something.

Check two: whose name is on the hosting account?

Hosting is where your website physically lives. If the site sits on your designer's hosting account, three things follow.

First, you cannot move. If the designer's service declines, or their prices climb, or they simply stop answering, your site stays where it is until they cooperate.

Second, you often cannot see what you are paying for. Designer-held hosting is usually bundled into a monthly fee, and you have no way of knowing what the underlying hosting costs or whether the markup is fair.

Third, if the designer's business fails, your website can go down with it. Small studios close all the time, and clients find out when the site stops loading and the renewal emails were going to an inbox nobody reads any more.

The fix is the same as with the domain: the hosting account should be created in your name, with your email address and your payment card, and the designer added as a collaborator or given deploy access. Every serious hosting platform supports this arrangement. There is no technical reason for the account to be theirs.

A word on the middle ground, because it is common and it is not automatically bad. Plenty of studios, mine included, offer a managed arrangement where the studio handles hosting, updates, and support for a monthly fee. That model is fine as long as the exit is clean: the domain is yours, the code is available to you, and the agreement says what happens when you leave. The problem is never the monthly fee. The problem is a monthly fee with no way out.

Can you get the code out?

This is the check most business owners never think to make, and it decides how expensive leaving will be.

If your site is custom-built, the code should live in a repository you can access, or at minimum the agreement should say you receive a full copy of the site's files and are entitled to an export on request. Without that, changing designer means paying someone to rebuild from scratch what you already paid to build once.

If your site is on a website builder such as Squarespace or Wix, understand that the code was never going to be portable. Builder sites cannot be exported to another platform in any useful way; the design and functionality belong to the builder's system. That is not a scandal, it is the trade-off those platforms offer, and for plenty of businesses it is a reasonable one. But it changes the ownership question: on a builder, make sure the builder subscription itself is in your account, not your designer's, because that account is the site.

The related question worth asking any designer before you sign: what happens to work in progress if we part ways mid-project? A fair answer is that you get what has been built to date for what has been paid to date. A vague answer here usually predicts vague answers later.

Does the analytics property belong to your account?

Analytics is the check people skip because it feels minor. It is not minor after a few years.

Your analytics property holds the history of your business online: which pages bring enquiries, where visitors come from, which search terms matter, what happened when you ran that ad campaign. If the property was created under your designer's account, that history is theirs. When you move on, you start from zero data, and your next designer or marketer is working blind for months.

Set up the analytics account yourself, or have the property created under your account with the designer added as a user. The same logic applies to your Google Business Profile and your Search Console access: your accounts, their access. Access can be granted and revoked. Ownership cannot, at least not easily.

What to agree before you sign anything

Here is the whole thing as a checklist you can put in front of any designer or agency before work starts:

• The domain is registered with you named as the registrant, in a registrar account you control.
• The hosting or builder account is in your name, with your payment details, with the designer given access rather than ownership.
• The contract states that you receive the site's code and content, or a full export, on completion and on termination.
• The analytics property, Search Console, and Google Business Profile are created under your accounts, with the designer added as a user.

None of this is an aggressive ask. A designer who works this way loses nothing except a hold over you they should not want, and any decent one will agree without friction. I have written before about what happens when your professional life runs through accounts you do not control, in the context of therapists working on platforms they do not own, and the principle is identical for a cafe, a trades business, or a clinic. Rented ground feels fine until you want to move.

One caution on the general information above: contracts vary, and if there is serious money or an existing dispute involved, read your current contract and get proper advice rather than relying on a blog post.

If you want to know how I handle this on my own projects, the short version is on the about page: your domain, your accounts, my access, and a clean exit if you ever want one. That arrangement costs me nothing to offer, which is rather the point. Ownership should be the default, not the upgrade.