Do you actually own your website? Check these four things

A test I wish more owners ran before signing anything:

If you stopped paying your web person tomorrow, what would you still have?

For a worrying number of businesses, the honest answer is nothing. The domain is registered under the agency's account. The site lives on their platform. The code is theirs. The photos and copy exist only inside their system. That's not a website. That's a rental with your name on the sign.

You usually discover this at the worst moment: the freelancer stops replying, the agency raises the retainer, or you simply want to leave and learn the price of the exit. I've seen businesses lose years of Google ranking because a relationship ended badly and the domain went with it.

Four things to check. Fifteen minutes, tops.

1. The domain: the one that can kill you

Your domain (yourbusiness.com) is the asset everything else hangs off: your Google history, your email, the address on your truck and your business cards.

Check: Log into the registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains…). Can you? Is the account yours, under your email? If the domain was registered "for you" by an agency, look up the WHOIS record. If their name is on it, you don't own your own address.

Fix: Ask for the domain to be transferred to a registrar account you control. Any legitimate provider will do this without drama. Resistance here tells you everything.

2. The hosting: whose account does it live in?

Modern sites live on platforms like Vercel, Netlify, or a hosting company. The question isn't which one. It's whose account.

Check: Do you have a login to the place your site is deployed? Could you see traffic, change a setting, or point the domain elsewhere yourself?

Fix: The project should sit in your account, with your provider granted access to work on it, not the other way around. This is a ten-minute change on most platforms.

3. The code: is there a repo with your name on it?

If your site is custom-built, the code should live in a repository (usually GitHub) that you own. That's what lets any competent developer pick up where the last one left off. No hostage negotiation, no rebuild from scratch.

Check: Ask, "Where's the repo, and am I the owner?" If the site is on a proprietary builder instead, understand what that means: you can never take the site anywhere. You'd be starting over.

Fix: For custom builds, have the repo transferred to your GitHub organization or account. It costs nothing and takes minutes.

4. The content: can you get it all back?

Copy, photography, your logo files, customer testimonials. You paid for these. If they exist only inside someone else's CMS, they're only yours in theory.

Check: Do you have the source files stored somewhere you control? That means the real logo files (not a screenshot), the original photos, and the written copy.

Fix: Ask for a handover folder. Again: a normal request that any good provider expects.

The standard worth demanding

None of this is exotic. It's how I hand over every project: the Vercel project, the GitHub repo, and the domain, all under the client's accounts, on launch day. I stay on call, but if a client ever wants to walk away, they walk away with the keys. That's what keeps everyone honest.

Run the four checks. If any of them fail, fix them while things are friendly. Ownership is cheap on a good day and very expensive on a bad one.