Who owns your website? Six things to check before you hire anyone

Most people find out who owns their website at the worst possible moment: when they want to leave. These six questions take ten minutes to ask and can save you months. Ask them before you pay a deposit, not after.

1. The domain name

This is the one that causes real damage. Your domain is your address — your website, your email, everything.

If your web designer registers it on their account “to make things easier”, they own your address. Leaving then means asking them to release it, and a domain transfer needs a code from the current owner and takes several days. If the relationship has gone sour, or they have simply stopped answering email, you have a serious problem.

What to do: register the domain yourself, in your own name, on your own account, with your own card. It costs about £12 a year. Give your designer access if they need it. Never let the registration sit in someone else's name.

2. The website files

Ask plainly: when this is finished and paid for, is the site mine?

The honest answer from most of the industry is yes, on final payment, and that is the normal arrangement. What you want to avoid is a licence — an arrangement where you pay monthly and the site reverts if you stop. Those exist. They are not always dishonest, but they are a very different deal from the one most people think they are signing.

Check for: the phrase “ownership transfers on full payment” in the terms, and the absence of anything describing the website as licensed to you.

3. Where it is hosted, and on whose account

Hosting on your designer's account is normal at the start and genuinely convenient — it means they can launch without waiting for you to set anything up. It becomes a problem only if nobody ever discusses what happens next.

Ask: whose hosting account is it on after month one, what does it cost, and what is involved in moving it. For a hand-built site the answer should be “we zip the files and hand them over”. For WordPress it should be “we export it as one package with the database”. Either should take about an hour.

4. The logins

Make a list now, while it is cheap: domain registrar, hosting, the website admin, Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Search Console, any email service, any plugin licences.

You want to be the owner on each of those, with your designer added as a user. The distinction matters enormously. An owner can remove a user. A user cannot remove an owner.

The one people forget is Google Business Profile. If somebody set it up for you on their own Google account, your listing — the thing most local customers actually find — belongs to them. Recovering one is possible but tedious.

5. The content

Your text and photos are yours. Two things are not automatically:

• Stock photography is licensed, not owned, and sometimes licensed to the designer rather than to you. Ask whether the licences transfer.
• Fonts, themes and plugins have their own licences. A premium theme bought on the designer's developer licence may not be yours to keep. This is normal, it just needs knowing about before you discover it.

If copy was written for you as part of the job, it should be yours on payment. Say so in writing.

6. Your email

Often overlooked, and the most disruptive to lose. If your email runs on your domain — you@yourbusiness.co.uk — then whoever controls the domain's settings controls whether your email works.

Keep the domain in your name and this takes care of itself. It is the main reason point one is point one.

The short version

Before you pay a deposit, get these in an email:

• The domain is registered in my name, on my account.
• The finished website is mine on final payment, outright, not licensed.
• These are the accounts involved, and I am the owner on each.
• This is where it is hosted, this is what it costs from month two.
• If I want to move it, this is what happens and this is what it costs.

Any decent web designer will answer all five without hesitating, because it is how they work anyway. Hesitation on any of them is the useful part of the exercise.