Owning your website: the questions to ask before you sign

The worst moment to discover you do not own your website is the moment you want to leave. It is a familiar story: the relationship has run its course, you ask for the files, and it turns out the domain is registered to your supplier, the site runs on a licence in their name, and nobody at your end has ever had an administrator password.

None of this is usually malice. It is what happens when nobody asked at the start. Ask at the start.

The domain is the one that really matters

Everything else can be rebuilt. Your domain name cannot be replaced, because it is on your business cards, in your email addresses, in every link anyone has ever shared, and in search results built up over years.

Ask, and get the answer in writing:

• Whose name and email are on the domain registration?
• Which company is it registered with, and do we have our own login there?
• Who pays the renewal, and what happens to it if we stop working together?

The right answer is that the domain is registered to your organisation, with your billing details, and you hold the account. Your supplier can have access. They should not have ownership. If a domain is currently registered in someone else’s name, transferring it is usually straightforward while everyone is on good terms and considerably less so afterwards.

Where does the site actually live

Hosting arranged through an agency is often fine and frequently better value than doing it yourself. What you need to know is whether it is portable.

• Is the hosting account in our name, or are we a tenant inside a larger account?
• If we leave, can we take a full copy of the site, files and database?
• How much notice would we get before the site is switched off?
• Are the backups ours to take with us?

Being a tenant is acceptable. Being a tenant with no export path is not.

Proprietary platforms and what happens when you leave one

Some agencies build on their own platform. It can be a perfectly good product. The question is what you are left holding if you stop paying.

With an open platform, another firm can pick the site up. With a closed one, leaving usually means rebuilding from scratch, and the exit cost was decided the day you signed. Neither is automatically wrong, but the price of leaving should be visible to you before you commit, not discovered later.

Ask directly: if we ended this in two years, what would we be able to take with us, and what would we have to rebuild?

Who owns the design, the code and the words

In many jurisdictions, the person who creates something owns the copyright unless a contract says otherwise. Paying for work does not automatically transfer ownership. So the contract needs to say it.

Worth separating out:

• Logo and brand assets. You should own these outright, and you should receive the original editable files, not only a PNG.
• Custom design and code written for you. Ownership or, at minimum, a permanent unrestricted licence to keep using and modifying it.
• Third-party components. Themes, plugins, fonts, stock photography. These are licensed, not owned, and licences have terms. Ask whether they are registered to you.
• Content you supplied. Obviously yours. Make sure the contract does not accidentally say otherwise.
• Photography. Check what the photographer’s licence permits and for how long.

Accounts and access

Over a few years an organisation accumulates a surprising number of accounts, and they are often all in one person’s name. Someone at your end should hold owner-level access to each, even if they never use it.

• The domain registrar and the hosting account.
• Website administrator access.
• Analytics, search console and any tag manager.
• Advertising accounts, and the payment method attached to them.
• Social media profiles, including the ones nobody posts to.
• The email marketing platform, and the list itself.
• Any business listing on a map service.

Advertising accounts deserve particular attention. If your ads run inside an agency’s account, the history and learning that make campaigns cheaper over time may not be transferable, which is a real cost you would rather know about in advance.

How the relationship ends

The exit clause tells you more about a supplier than the sales conversation does. Look for the notice period on both sides, whether there is a minimum term, what a handover includes and whether it is chargeable, and how quickly access is transferred once notice is given.

A supplier who has thought about this and answers plainly is telling you something useful. So is one who becomes vague.

Keep a one-page record

Write down every account, who owns it, where it is, who pays for it and when it renews. Store it where more than one person in the organisation can reach it. Review it once a year and whenever someone leaves.

It takes an hour. It is the difference between changing supplier being an administrative task and being a crisis. If you are starting a conversation with a new partner, ask these questions in the first meeting rather than the last, and see how the answers come back. Ours are set out on our contact page if you want to put them to us.