Who really owns your website? A plain-English guide for business owners

Here’s a question almost no small business owner thinks to ask when they get a website built: if I fell out with this person tomorrow, could I take my site and walk?

Most of the time the honest answer is no, and they don’t find out until it’s a problem. The site works, the invoices get paid, everyone’s happy, and quietly the whole thing is sitting inside someone else’s accounts. Then one day you want to change developer, or the person who built it goes quiet, or stops trading altogether, and you discover you don’t actually own the thing your customers judge you by.

This is fixable, and it’s easy to get right if you sort it at the start. So here’s the plain-English version of what “owning your website” actually means, and how to make sure you do.

Your website is really three things

People say “my website” like it’s one object. It’s not. It’s three separate things that happen to work together, and you can own or not own each of them independently. This is the single most useful thing to understand, so bear with me for thirty seconds:

• The domain. Your web address, like yourbusiness.co.uk. You rent this from a registrar for roughly £10 a year. It’s the sign over the door.
• The code. The actual files that make up the pages, the words, the design, the layout. This is the building itself.
• The hosting. The service that stores those files and serves them to anyone who visits. This is the plot of land the building sits on.

A proper website needs all three, pointing at each other. And here’s the catch: each one lives in an account somewhere, and whoever owns that account owns that piece. If your developer set all three up under their logins, then legally and practically, it’s their website with your name on it.

The domain is the one that really matters

If you take one thing from this, take this: whoever controls the domain controls the site.

The domain is the crown jewel because everything else points at it. You can rebuild the code, you can move the hosting, but your web address, the thing on your business cards, your van, your Google listing, is irreplaceable. If someone else holds your domain, they can switch your entire website off, or point it somewhere else, and there is very little you can do about it in a hurry.

So the domain should be registered in your name, on your email, ideally paid with your card. It costs about a tenner a year. This is non-negotiable, and it’s the first thing I’d check about any site you already have. If you’re not sure who owns yours right now, that’s worth finding out this week, not the week you need it.

You can lose the code and survive. You can move hosting in an afternoon. Lose the domain and you’ve lost the address every customer, every listing, and every search result points to.

“But I’ve never heard of any of this”

Good. You’re not supposed to have. If your website is built on a modern setup, the code might live somewhere called GitHub and the hosting somewhere called Netlify, and there is no reason on earth a plumber or a physio should know what those are. That’s my job, not yours.

Here’s the important bit, though, and it’s the thing that trips people up: you don’t need to understand these tools to own them. You just need to own the logins.

Owning the account and using the account are two completely different things. I can set up every account in your name and email, do all the technical work myself, and you might never log in to any of them. But because they’re yours, you’re never trapped. You can hand those logins to any other developer in the world and they can pick your site straight up. That’s what real ownership looks like: not that you can drive it, but that you’re not locked in the boot.

The good news on cost: for a typical small-business site, a domain (~£10 a year) is usually the only guaranteed expense. The code and hosting sit comfortably on free plans that cover a normal brochure or local-business site completely.

The lock-in trick to watch for

I’ll be blunt, because it’s the whole reason this guide exists. A lot of cheap web work keeps the domain and hosting under the builder’s account on purpose. Sometimes it’s laziness. Often it’s deliberate: if they hold the keys, you can’t easily leave, and you keep paying them.

It usually doesn’t look sinister. It looks like convenience. “Don’t worry, I’ll sort all that out, I’ll handle the domain and hosting for you.” And they do, and it’s genuinely easier for you at the time. The bill only arrives later, the day you want to move on and realise you can’t take anything with you.

You don’t need to be paranoid about this. You just need to ask one question before you hire anyone: “Will everything be registered in my name, and will I get all the logins in writing?” The right answer is an immediate, cheerful yes. Any hesitation, any “it’s easier if I keep it on my account,” is your signal to be careful.

What an honest handoff looks like

When I finish a site, the handoff isn’t a mystery. You get, in writing:

• Every login. Domain, code, hosting, all in your name, all documented in one place.
• A plain-English map of what lives where and what each part does, so you’re never staring at a bill wondering what it’s for.
• Confirmation that the important stuff points at you — enquiry emails going to your inbox, any analytics under your account, not mine.
• A short walkthrough so you can see how it all fits together, even if you never touch it again.

The test is simple. After the handoff, if I vanished off the face of the earth, could you hand everything to another developer and carry on? If the answer is yes, the handoff was done properly. If it’s no, it wasn’t, whoever built it.

None of this is expensive or complicated. It’s mostly a matter of whoever builds your site choosing to set things up in your name rather than theirs. That choice is the whole difference between a website you own and a website you rent from a person.

Common questions

What should I own when someone builds my website?

Three things, and all of them should be in your name: your domain (your web address, e.g. yourbusiness.co.uk), the code that makes up the site, and the hosting account that serves it to visitors. If all three are registered to you, you can hand them to any developer in the world and they can pick the site straight up. If any of them sits inside someone else’s account, you’re relying on that person’s goodwill to leave. The domain matters most of all: whoever controls the domain controls the site.

I’ve never heard of GitHub or Netlify. Do I need to understand them?

No. Most business owners never log in to either, and never need to. GitHub is where the website’s code lives and Netlify is what serves it to visitors; they’re the plumbing behind the site. What matters isn’t that you understand them, it’s that the accounts are set up in your name and email, so the logins are yours. Then you’re never trapped: you can hand those logins to another developer at any time. Owning the account and using the account are two different things.

What happens if I fall out with the person who built my site?

If everything is in your name, nothing happens to your site. You keep the domain, the code, and the hosting, and you hand the logins to someone else. If the person who built it kept the domain or hosting under their own account, that’s where it gets painful: they can hold the site hostage, and getting it back can mean legal letters or, worst case, rebuilding from scratch. This is exactly why you sort ownership out at the start, while everyone’s still friendly, not at the point you want to leave.

That’s the entire philosophy behind how I work, honestly. No black box, no keys kept in my pocket, nothing you can’t take with you. You should hire me because the work’s good, not because leaving would be a nightmare.