Who owns your website?

If your agency disappeared tomorrow, what would you still have?

Most companies think the answer is “the website”. Then they check.

The domain was registered by a freelancer in 2016, to his email, and he has moved on. The site runs on the agency’s hosting account. The code sits in the agency’s GitHub. Analytics belongs to a former marketing manager’s personal Gmail. The CMS super-admin is a login on a laptop somebody took with them.

You paid for all of it. You own almost none of it.

Six things, one list

A website is not one asset. It’s six, held in six places, and each can have a different name on it.

The domain — the name itself. DNS — where the name points. Hosting — where the site runs. The code — the repository it deploys from. The CMS and content — every page and image. Analytics and ad accounts — the data and the spend.

Lose the domain and the site is gone. Lose the repo and you can’t change it. Lose analytics and three years of numbers go with it. Lose the ad account and you start again at zero, with the platform treating you as a stranger.

Access is not ownership

This is the distinction that matters, and it’s the one nobody explains.

Ownership is your name on the account. You can add people, remove people, move it, sell it, and nobody can lock you out. If the relationship ends, nothing changes.

Access is a seat someone gave you. You can log in and work, and the person whose name is on the account decides for how long. If they leave, forget, or disagree with you — so does your website.

Most agencies give clients access and call it ownership. Sometimes that’s lock-in by design. More often it’s just how the first account got made and nobody went back to fix it.

What good looks like

Everything in your name from day one. The agency has access, and you can revoke it in an afternoon.

That’s our rule and it’s in every proposal we write, because it’s the only way you can tell the work is yours: you could end the relationship on Friday and the site would still be up on Monday, editable, measured, and pointing where it should.

It costs the agency nothing to do this. It costs you everything when they don’t.

This week

Ask six questions. Who is the domain registrant, and whose email gets the renewal notice? Where does DNS live? Who is the billing owner on hosting, not just an admin? Who owns the repo? Is the CMS super-admin yours, and is there an export? Whose account owns the analytics property and the ad account?

Every answer should be a name in your company. Where it isn’t, fix it. A domain transfer takes a day. A repository transfer takes ten minutes. An analytics ownership change takes one click by the current owner — which is why you want to ask while they still answer emails.

Access is a favour. Ownership is a right. Make sure you have the second one before you need it.