Who owns your website?
Here’s a question most business owners have never asked, and the ones who have usually asked it at the worst possible moment.
You paid for your website. But do you own it?
They’re not the same thing, and the gap between them is where people get stuck. I’ve seen it more times than I’d like: a business wants to make a change, or move on, or just get into their own site, and they can’t. Because it was never really theirs.
The three things that are actually yours (or should be)
Your domain name. This is the address, the yourbusiness.co.uk bit. It should be registered in your name, on an account you can log into. Often it isn’t. It was registered by a bloke who did your site in 2016 and isn’t answering emails, and now it renews to his card, on his account, and you can’t touch it. When you want to move, you need his say-so, and sometimes his invoice.
The website itself. The pages, the words, the photos, the build. Can you get a copy? Can you take it elsewhere? A lot of the cheap website builders and “free with your hosting” deals keep you on their platform on purpose. Stop paying and it vanishes. You were renting the whole time and didn’t know it.
Your Google Business Profile and your reviews. The listing with your map pin and your reviews is one of your most valuable assets, and it should be under your own Google account, not your last web person’s. If someone else “manages” it and disappears, you can be locked out of your own reviews.
Why it only bites when it’s too late
Everything works fine right up until you need to change something.
Then the person who set it all up has moved on, or gone quiet, or wants paying to hand over what was yours all along. Your site’s still up, but you’re a passenger in your own business. No awkward emails in 2031, is the idea, but that only holds if you own the keys today.
How to check, in ten minutes, for free
You don’t need me for this bit.
- Find out who your domain is registered to. A quick lookup (search “whois” and your domain) tells you the registrar. Then make sure you have the login. If you don’t know it, that’s the first thing to sort.
- Ask yourself: if my web person vanished tomorrow, could I still get into my site and my Google listing? If the answer’s no, or “I’d have to ask them,” you’ve found the problem.
- Get the logins in your own name. Domain, hosting, Google. Write them down somewhere safe. That’s ownership.
How I do it, for what it’s worth
When I build a site, the domain stays in the client’s name, on their account. If they ever want to leave, they take the site with them, no hostage situation, no leaving fee. I think that’s just how it should work. A business should never be locked into me because it can’t get at its own front door.
That’s the whole point, really. You should own the thing your customers find you through. Anything less and you don’t have a website, you have a rental with someone else holding the keys.
Not sure what you actually own? Send me your domain and I’ll tell you what I can see, no charge. Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.