Who actually owns your website? A five-minute check worth doing today

This is not an urgent question, right up until the afternoon it becomes the only question.

A web designer retires, or emigrates, or simply stops answering. A relationship ends badly. Somebody buys the business and wants the website moved. A domain renewal fails because it was on a card that expired in 2022. In every one of those situations, the thing that decides whether you are mildly inconvenienced or genuinely stuck is something you could have checked, at leisure, years earlier.

It takes about five minutes. Go and do it, then carry on with your day.

The four things you think are one thing

Most business owners talk about the website as a single object. It’s four, and they can belong to four different parties.

The domain name is your address. It’s rented from a registrar, yearly, and it is the single most valuable item on this list. Without it, nothing else matters.

The hosting is the computer your website lives on, rented by the month or year.

The website itself is the design, the pages, the photographs, the words, and whatever system is used to manage them.

The email is separate again, even though it uses the same domain name.

Those four are often bought by different people at different times, and nobody writes it down.

The five-minute check

1. Look up your own domain

For a .uk domain, use Nominet’s public lookup at nominet.uk/whois. For a .com or .co, use lookup.icann.org.

You’re looking for the registrant. If your business is named there, good. If somebody else is, or the registrant is hidden behind a privacy service you didn’t arrange, that’s worth a conversation.

Privacy rules mean an individual’s details are usually withheld on .uk domains, so a blank registrant is not automatically a red flag. The registrar, though, is always visible, and it tells you where the account lives.

2. Can you get into that account yourself?

This is the real test, and it is a better one than the registrant field. Log in. If you can’t, and nobody can tell you who can, you have found your answer.

3. Where does your email actually go?

If your mailboxes come bundled with your website hosting, then whoever controls the hosting controls whether your email works. Plenty of businesses discover this at the worst possible moment.

4. Do you have proper access to the website itself?

Not a login that lets you edit one page. An administrator login, or a clear written agreement about who has one and what happens if you part company.

5. Is any of it written down?

One sheet of paper. What you pay, to whom, for what, renewing when. If you are hit by a bus tomorrow, could somebody else keep your business online? On a surprising number of small businesses the honest answer is no.

What is reasonable, and what isn’t

A word in defence of web designers, since we are some.

Not every arrangement has to hand you everything. A great many small businesses, very sensibly, rent a platform rather than own a bespoke system, and that is a perfectly fair deal. We work that way ourselves: our packages include the platform the site runs on, and that platform is ours rather than yours. The same is true of every DIY builder, every shop system and most booking software.

What matters is that the deal is stated plainly. The reasonable version looks like this:

• Your domain name is registered to you, and you can get at it.
• Your content, your photographs and your words are yours to take.
• You can leave without a fight, and without a fee designed to stop you.
• Somebody will tell you honestly what does and doesn’t come with you.

The unreasonable version is a domain quietly registered in the designer’s name, no access to anything, and a monthly fee that turns out to be the price of not being switched off.

Questions worth asking before you sign anything

Ask any prospective provider, including us:

• In whose name will the domain be registered?
• If I leave in three years, what exactly do I take with me?
• Who has the administrator login, and can I have one?
• What happens to my website if your business closes?

Any provider worth having will answer all four without hesitating. If the answers get vague, that vagueness is the information.

If the answers came out wrong

Don’t panic, and don’t start an argument by email at eleven at night. In most cases this is oversight rather than malice: the designer registered the domain because it was quicker at the time, and never thought about it again.

Ask politely for the domain to be transferred into your name. Ask for administrator access. Get the renewal dates. If you meet a genuine refusal, at least you have found out while your website is still working, which is an enormously better position than finding out afterwards.

And if you’re about to move anyway, what happens when a business outgrows Wix covers what a move actually involves, while our explainer on website support sets out what an ongoing arrangement ought to include in the first place.