Swain-Tech Studio websites for small businesses and independent creatives

Who Owns Your Website

The worst call I get is from someone who wants to move their site and cannot, because the domain is registered to their former designer and that designer is not answering email.

It is not usually malice. It is that nobody wrote down who owns what, and the person who set everything up used their own accounts because it was faster. Good systems also reduce what people have to keep in their heads; learn more explains that idea in more detail.

A website is not one thing you own. It is five, and you can end up owning three of them.

The five

The domain name. The address itself. Rented from a registrar, renewed annually. This is the one that matters most, because whoever controls it controls whether your site exists and where your email goes.

The hosting. The server. Easy to move if you own the files and the domain.

The files and the design. The actual code, templates and images. Whether these are yours depends entirely on your contract. For an independent reference beyond this site, ICANN is a useful place to compare approaches.

The content. Your words, your photographs, your product descriptions. Usually yours, but photography licensed by the designer may not be.

The accounts. Analytics, mailing list, payment processor, plugin licences, the site's own admin login. These are the quietest failure: everything works, right up to the day you need to change one.

The checks, before you pay the final invoice

Five minutes, and they save the situation described above.

Is the domain registered in your name, with your email as the contact? Log in to the registrar yourself and look. Not "my designer says it's mine" — look. If you cannot log in, you do not control it.

Are you the owner on hosting, with billing in your name? Being an authorised user is not the same as owning the account.

Do you have admin access to your own site, at a level that can add and remove other administrators?

Are analytics and the mailing list under your account, with the designer added as a user rather than the reverse?

Does the contract say the design and code are yours on final payment? In writing. This belongs in the contract discussion alongside everything else.

Where it legitimately gets complicated

Not everything can be yours, and a designer saying so is not hiding anything.

Licensed components. A premium theme or plugin is often licensed per site or per developer. You may hold a licence rather than own the software, and the licence may need renewal. Ask which, and what happens when it lapses.

Stock photography. Licensed for specific uses, sometimes to the designer rather than to you. Ask for the licence documents.

Fonts. Web fonts carry licences with traffic limits and transfer conditions.

Reusable frameworks. Many developers, myself included, build on a base they reuse across clients — one reason a quote is not just a page count. Your site is yours; the underlying toolkit is not exclusively yours. That is normal, and it should be stated rather than discovered.

The test is not whether every component is exclusively yours. It is whether you could hand everything to a different developer tomorrow and have them continue. If yes, the arrangement is fine.

If you are already stuck

Domain held by someone else. Registrars have dispute processes, and evidence that you paid for it and have used it for your business matters. Start with the registrar's transfer procedure and keep everything in writing. If you have the account email, a password reset sometimes resolves it in a minute.

No admin access. If you have hosting access, an administrator can usually be created from the database or hosting control panel. Any competent developer can do this in under an hour.

Files but no design source. Frequently survivable — a working site can be moved as-is even if you do not have the original design files.

Nothing at all. Then you are rebuilding, and the first job is to make sure it does not happen twice. Register the domain yourself, today, before anything else.

The one habit worth having

Own the domain and the email account attached to it, personally, forever.

Everything else is recoverable. Hosting can be changed, files rebuilt, designers replaced. A domain you do not control is the only piece that can take your business address away, and it costs about fifteen dollars a year to hold.

Register it yourself, with your own email and payment card, and add your developer as a user. If they object to that arrangement, you have learned something useful early.

The short version