Do I Own My Website When It Is Finished?

Yes. The website, the domain and the content are yours. If you later decide to move elsewhere, you can, and we hand over what is needed to do that.

It is worth understanding what that sentence covers, because it is not universal in this industry and the businesses that discover the difference usually do so at the worst possible moment.

The four things you should own

The domain. Registered to your business, not to your developer. This is the one that causes the most damage when it is wrong, because whoever the domain is registered to controls where your website and your email point.

The website files and database. The actual site (design, code and content), in a form that can be moved to another provider.

The content. Your text, images and product data.

The accounts. Hosting, analytics, search console, payment integrations. Ideally in your name with access granted to whoever manages them, rather than the other way round.

The trap

The common problem is not malice. It is that a developer registers the domain and sets up the accounts under their own details because it was quicker at the time, and nobody revisits it. Years later that developer has moved on, changed email address or gone quiet, and the business finds it cannot renew its own domain or move its own site.

We find this more often than you would expect, usually when someone comes to us to take over a site. Checking who your domain is actually registered to is a five-minute job worth doing today whether or not you work with us.

Ownership and management are different things

Handing management to someone does not mean handing over ownership. Our domain management service takes on the work (tracking renewals, handling them before expiry, managing DNS, monitoring the expiry date), while the domain stays registered to you. Part of the annual review is confirming exactly that.

The same applies to managed hosting. We manage the environment; the site remains yours to take elsewhere if you choose.

What to confirm before you start

With any supplier, before work begins: who the domain will be registered to, whether you get the site files and database on request, whether the site is built on something you could move, and what happens to your access if you stop working together.

A supplier who answers those plainly is telling you something useful. A supplier who is vague about them is also telling you something useful.

What handover includes

At the end of a project you get access to the site and its content management, the documentation to run it, and confirmation that the domain is registered to you. If you want to move to another provider later, we hand over the files and the database.

We would rather keep clients because staying is worth it than because leaving is difficult.