Who Actually Owns Your Website? What to Check Before You Switch Developers

A business owner got in touch with us a few months back because her web developer, a sole trader she'd used for years, had stopped replying to emails. Nothing dramatic, no falling out, he'd just gone quiet. The problem wasn't the silence. It was that she had no idea how to get into her own website, because he'd registered the domain in his name, hosted the site on his own personal server account, and never handed over a single login.

That's a more common situation than most business owners realise, and it rarely comes up until it's urgent: the agency has gone bust, the freelancer has disappeared, or you simply want to move to someone better and discover you can't take your website with you. This post is about checking where you actually stand, before you're forced to find out the hard way.

The three things you need to actually own

A website isn't one thing you either own or don't. It's three separate pieces, and it's entirely possible to think you own all of them while actually controlling none.

The domain name. This is the easiest to check and the one people get wrong most often. Your domain should be registered in your business's name, with your own email address as the contact, through an account you control the login to. Nominet, the organisation that runs the .uk registry, has a public WHOIS lookup tool where you can check who's listed as the registrant for any .uk domain. If it comes back with your developer's name, their agency, or an email address you don't recognise, you don't own your domain. You're renting it from whoever does.

The hosting and the code. This is where things get murkier, because "hosting" can mean anything from a proper account in your name with a provider like a UK hosting company, to a folder on a server your developer manages personally alongside a dozen other clients. If your developer disappeared tomorrow, would you know which server your site lives on, whether you could log into it, and whether the code itself (not just the website as it appears in a browser) is something you have a copy of?

The CMS and your content. If your site runs on WordPress, Webflow, or something custom, you should have your own admin login with full access, not a view-only account or one that depends on the developer's master login. The content you've written, the images you've uploaded, and any customer data flowing through forms or bookings are yours. They shouldn't require someone else's permission to export.

How to actually check this today

You don't need to wait for a crisis to find out where you stand. Thirty minutes will usually tell you everything.

Start with the domain. Run your own domain through a WHOIS lookup (Nominet's tool works for any .uk address, and most registrars offer an equivalent for .com and other extensions) and see whose name comes back. Then check your email: can you find the original invoice or confirmation email for the domain purchase, and does it show an account you can log into yourself?

Next, ask whoever manages your hosting a direct question: "If I wanted to move my website to a different host tomorrow, what would you need to send me?" A developer who can answer that in a sentence, usually "a full backup and your login details, give me a day," is behaving the way they should. One who hesitates, gets defensive, or starts talking about why that would be difficult is telling you something important about the arrangement you're actually in.

Finally, log into your CMS yourself, right now, without asking anyone for help. If you can't remember your own login, or you've never had one because "it's easier if we just make the changes for you," that's worth fixing regardless of how good the relationship is otherwise.

The red flags that show up before the crisis does

A few patterns tend to show up well before an actual falling-out. Every change to your site, however small, has to go through the agency, and you're never given the option to do it yourself even for a typo fix. Invoices reference "hosting" as a flat monthly fee with no breakdown of what that covers or where it's hosted. Nobody can tell you, in plain terms, where your domain is registered when you ask. And perhaps the clearest one: the relationship feels fine until you mention wanting a second opinion or a quote from someone else, and the tone changes.

None of these automatically mean bad faith. Plenty of agencies manage hosting on clients' behalf for good reasons, mainly because most business owners don't want to deal with server management themselves. The issue isn't that someone else manages it. It's whether you could take it back if you needed to, and whether anyone's ever been straight with you about that.

If you're already planning to switch

If you've checked the above and found gaps, or you're actively moving to a new developer, there's a sensible order to do it in. Get a full backup of your site first, both the files and the database if it's a CMS-driven site, before you tell anyone you're leaving. Request your domain's authorisation code (sometimes called an EPP code or IPS tag transfer for .uk domains) in writing, with a reasonable deadline, ideally while the relationship is still cordial. Only once you've confirmed the new setup is working should you update your domain's nameservers to point away from the old host, because that's the step that actually takes your site live somewhere new, and you want a working destination before you flip that switch.

A good new developer will usually help you through exactly this process as part of onboarding, because they've done it dozens of times and know where the snags usually are.

Building this in properly next time

If you're starting a new website project, the fix is simple and costs nothing: insist that the domain is registered in your business's name from day one, with your own account and email as the contact, and that you're given your own admin access to everything from the first week, not handed over only at the end. Any developer worth working with will think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for, because it's how they'd want it done if the roles were reversed.

At Digital Hand, this is just how we set things up by default. Your domain sits in your name, your hosting account is yours, and you get full access to your own site from the start, whether that's with us for years or for one project. If you're not sure where you currently stand with an existing site, or you're planning a switch and want a second pair of eyes on the handover, you can book a free 15-minute consultation and we'll help you work out what you've actually got.