Do You Actually Own Your Website? Three Ways to Check
Most business owners assume they own their website. A surprising number don’t, and they find out at the worst possible moment: when they want to leave.
This takes about ten minutes to check. Do it now rather than when you’re already frustrated with somebody.
Check 1 · Who owns your domain name
Your domain is the address. It is the single most important asset in this whole conversation, because everything else can be rebuilt and this can’t.
How to check: search for a “whois lookup” tool, type in your domain, and look at the registrant.
What you want to see: your name or your business name, and your email address.
What’s a problem: your web designer’s name. Their agency. Their email. If somebody else is the registrant, they control the address your customers have been typing for years, and if that relationship goes bad, you have a genuine problem.
The fix: ask for it to be transferred to an account in your name. This is a normal, reasonable request. If somebody resists it, that tells you something important.
Some registrars hide details behind privacy protection, which is fine and normal. In that case just log into whatever registrar account you were given and confirm it’s actually yours.
Check 2 · Ask for the files
Not the login. The files.
Send this exact message: “Can you send me the files for my website?”
If the answer is yes, and you get a folder of HTML, CSS, images, and so on, you own something. Any competent developer can pick that up and keep going.
If the answer is a paragraph, you don’t.
The paragraph usually sounds like “well, it’s built on our proprietary platform, so it doesn’t really work like that.” That’s a no with extra steps.
Worth knowing about the big builders: Wix, Squarespace, and most drag-and-drop platforms genuinely cannot export a working website. That’s not your designer being difficult, it’s how the product works. But it does mean that if you stop paying, you’re rebuilding from scratch.
Check 3 · Find out what happens if you stop paying
Ask directly: “If I stopped paying, what happens to my website?”
Good answer: it keeps working, you just don’t get support or updates.
Bad answer: it comes down.
If it comes down, you were never buying a website. You were renting one. Which can be a fine arrangement if you went in knowing that, and is a rough surprise if you didn’t.
Run the math while you’re here. $99 a month is $3,564 over three years for something you can’t take with you.
What to do if you don’t like the answers
You’re not stuck. You just have to move on purpose.
1. Get the domain into your name first. This is the urgent one. Everything else can wait.
2. Save your content. Copy, photos, service descriptions. That’s yours regardless of what any platform claims. Copy it into a document today.
3. Screenshot everything. Every page. So whoever rebuilds it knows what existed.
4. Don’t cancel until the new site is ready. Overlap by a couple of weeks. A dark site costs you more than one extra month of a bad subscription.
5. Make sure the next one is different. Ask before you hire, not after: do I own the files, is the domain in my name, and what happens if I stop paying.
Why I do it the other way
I charge once. When it’s done you get every file, the domain in your name, and the hosting in your name.
If you never speak to me again, the site keeps working. That’s not generosity, that’s just what owning something means.
I do have a monthly service, and I’ll be straight about it: it’s Google Business Profile management, $299, cancelable any month. That’s ongoing work with ongoing results. It has nothing to do with whether your website stays online.
Go run the three checks. Ten minutes.
