It surfaces at the worst possible moment. You want to change the phone number on your website, or move to a new designer, or the site has gone down — and nobody in your business can get into anything. The person who built it five years ago has stopped replying, or closed their company, or is willing to help but somewhere with no signal.
Ownership of a website is not one thing. It is at least four things, they can sit in four different places, and most small businesses have never checked where any of them are. Here is how to find out, in about half an hour, and what to do if the answer is not the one you expected.
Four separate things that come apart
When someone says they built your website, they may have taken charge of four separable assets: the domain name, the hosting, the site itself, and the accounts attached to it. Your domain can be registered to your designer while the site files sit in hosting you pay for directly and your Google Business Profile belongs to an agency you stopped using in 2022. None of it is visible from looking at the website.
Most of the time it is not malice. Someone had to buy the domain during the build, they used their own account because it was quicker, and nobody revisited it. The problem is not how it started; it is that a convenience quietly becomes a dependency, and dependencies only get tested on the day you need them to hold.
The domain is the one that actually matters
Everything else can be rebuilt. Lose the domain and you lose the address customers type, the links other sites have built to you over the years, your rankings, and — because email usually runs on the same domain — your email.
The word to know is registrant. The registrant is the legal holder of a domain name. The administrative and technical contacts are not: those roles manage a domain on the holder's behalf. Your designer listed as the technical contact on a domain registered to your business is a perfectly healthy arrangement. Your designer listed as the registrant is not. That field should name your business — the limited company, or you by name if you are a sole trader.
Checking is harder than it should be. Public WHOIS lookups now redact most personal details for UK and European registrants, so a search often tells you nothing. The reliable route is to log into the account where the domain lives and read the registrant field yourself. If you cannot log in, you have your answer already.
Moving a domain and changing its owner are different jobs
These two get confused constantly. Moving a domain to a different provider changes who manages it. Changing the registrant changes who holds it. You can do either without the other, and it is the second that decides ownership.
For .uk domains, Nominet is the registry, and a change of registered holder goes through Nominet as its own request with its own small fee, rather than something your provider does quietly in the background. For .com and the other generic domains, your registrar handles it, and a change of registrant typically locks the domain against being transferred elsewhere for a period afterwards — worth knowing if you planned to do both at once.
Hosting, and the bill you never see
Hosting is where the site actually lives. The common small business arrangement is resold: you pay your designer monthly, they pay the hosting company, and your site sits in an account alongside a few dozen other clients' sites. It works well right up until it doesn't. If that person stops trading the account can lapse with no warning, and reseller setups rarely leave you holding a usable backup.
Two questions settle it. Which company actually hosts the site, and is there an account in your name with them? If the answer to the second is no, ask for one — or for a full backup, files and database, that you keep yourself. A copy of your website in your own storage costs nothing and removes most of the risk described here.
The site itself, and the platform trap
Whether you own the site depends on what was built and what you agreed. Custom code written for you should be yours outright, and a plain contract clause is enough to say so. Licensed components are murkier: a premium theme or plugin bought on your designer's licence stops receiving updates the day they stop paying for it, which lands on you as a security problem whoever owns the site.
The builder platforms are their own case. If your site was made on Wix, Squarespace or something similar, you own your content but you cannot take the site — it only runs on that platform. You can usually export text and images; you cannot move the design or the structure. That is a fair trade for what those tools cost, and no reason on its own to avoid them — it is just worth knowing before you assume that moving elsewhere later would be a lift and shift.
The accounts everyone forgets
Your website is only part of your online presence, and the rest is usually scattered across services set up by different people at different times. Work through this list and confirm that an account you control holds owner-level access to each one:
- —The domain registrar account, and the DNS records inside it
- —The hosting account, or a recent backup of the site if hosting is resold to you
- —Google Business Profile — the listing that puts you in the map pack
- —Google Analytics and Google Search Console
- —Google Ads, if you run it, together with its conversion history
- —Your email provider, and whoever controls the mail records pointing at it
- —Social accounts, review platform logins, and any booking or payment system wired into the site
If something is in the wrong name, start politely
Assume goodwill first, because it is usually warranted. Most of these situations resolve with one unemotional email naming exactly what you want moved and where it should go. Being specific removes most of the friction, and a supplier who was simply never asked will generally just do it.
If that fails, each asset has its own route. Domains go through the registrar or the registry, and it helps to arrive with proof of the company, the invoices showing you paid, and a record of your attempts to make contact — registrars see this more often than you would imagine. Google Business Profile has a formal process for requesting access to a listing someone else manages: you ask, Google contacts the current owner, and if they do not respond within a few days access can pass to you. Hosting is hardest, because there may be nothing to recover beyond a backup.
One honest caution. Ownership is decided by what you agreed as well as by what is registered where. If a contract genuinely assigned rights to the supplier, or invoices were never paid, the answer may not be the one you want. That is unusual, but it is a reason to read the paperwork before writing a firm email.
What to agree before anyone builds you anything
All of this is far cheaper to arrange at the start than to unpick later. Whoever you hire, settle these in writing before work begins:
- —The domain is registered to your business as registrant, in an account you can log into yourself
- —You have your own hosting login, or a backup of the site that you hold independently
- —The website, its code and its content are yours outright once the final invoice is paid
- —You are the owner on every account created for you, with your supplier added as a manager
- —You can leave with reasonable notice and take everything with you, with no release fee
- —Someone inside your business holds the passwords too, in a password manager rather than a spreadsheet
How we handle this
None of this is where a web designer earns their fee. It is just the part that quietly decides how much choice you have on the day you want to change something.
We build every site so the question never has to be asked: the domain in your name, the accounts in your name, and the site, the code and the content yours from day one. There are no long contracts either — if we look after the site after launch, you can leave on 30 days' notice and take the lot with you, because it was yours the whole time.
If you have inherited a website and are not sure what you control, we are happy to run through the checks above with you and say plainly what we find. Often everything is in order and you can stop thinking about it, and when that is the answer we would rather tell you.