Who owns your website? Domain, hosting, content and code

You own your website only if five things are in your company's name: the domain registration, the hosting account, the code (with the copyright transferred to you in writing), the content, and the admin access to the accounts around the site, such as DNS, email, analytics and Search Console. Paying for the site does not, on its own, make you the owner of any of them. Each sits in a separate account, and in many businesses at least one of them is held by an agency, a freelancer or an employee who has since left.

Most of the time this causes no trouble. It becomes a problem on the day you want to change agency, the person who set things up leaves, or a renewal fails and the only person who can fix it does not answer. This guide lists each part, who should hold it, and how to check what you hold today.

What are the parts of a website that someone can own?

The first two rows matter most. A website can be rebuilt in weeks. A domain lost to an expiry or a dispute can take months to recover, if it comes back at all. When we take on a site for website care and maintenance, checking these seven rows is the first task, before any update or fix.

Does paying for a website mean you own the code?

Not automatically. Copyright in code belongs to whoever wrote it unless a written agreement says otherwise, and the rules are stricter than most business owners expect.

In India, under the Copyright Act, 1957, the author is the first owner of a work. The main exception is work made by an employee in the course of employment. A studio or freelancer you hired is not your employee, so it owns the copyright in the code it writes until it assigns that copyright to you, and an assignment has to be in writing. In the US, software written by an independent contractor is generally not a "work made for hire" either; the US Copyright Office's circular on works made for hire explains the narrow categories where it can be. Other countries differ. Check the position for your company with your lawyer.

The practical answer is a contract clause that transfers the copyright in the custom code to you on final payment, plus a licence to use any third-party parts. WordPress itself, plugins, open-source libraries and fonts stay under their own licences; you get the right to use them, not to own them. What a website development contract should include covers the wording.

On a hosted builder such as Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, there is no code to transfer. You own the content and the domain; the platform owns the software, and you rent it.

Who owns the domain if the agency registered it?

The registrant of record does. ICANN's registrant rights and responsibilities are written around that person or company, and a registrar will act on the registrant's instructions, not on whoever paid the invoice.

Three arrangements are common, and only the first is safe:

1. Your company is the registrant, in an account you control. The agency has delegated access or a separate login. This is what you want.
2. Your company is the registrant, but the account belongs to the agency or an employee. Recoverable, usually with the account holder's cooperation or the registrar's support process.
3. The agency or an employee is the registrant. They own the domain in every practical sense until they transfer it.

To find out which you have, log in to the registrar account, or ask whoever pays the renewal for a screenshot of the registrant details. A public lookup at lookup.icann.org shows the registrar and the expiry date, but the registrant's name is usually hidden by privacy rules. If you are in the second or third arrangement, how to get control of your domain back is the step-by-step version.

Should the hosting account be in your name?

Yes, with the agency added as a user or team member. Our care work runs this way: the client holds the hosting account and the billing, and we manage it with our own logins. When a care arrangement ends, nothing needs migrating; the client removes our access.

There is one honest exception. Some agencies host many small sites on one server they manage, and charge a single fee for hosting and care. That can be cheaper and perfectly fine, as long as the contract says three things: you can have a full backup of files and database on request, the agency will help you move within a stated time if you leave, and the domain stays in your account regardless. Use the hosting cost calculator to see what the hosting part would cost on its own, so you know how much of the fee is hosting and how much is the agency's work.

How do you check what you own today?

Set aside an hour and work down this list with whoever handles the website.

1. Domain. Log in to the registrar. Confirm the registrant is the company, the contact email is a role address such as domains@ rather than a person's inbox, auto-renew is on, and the card on file is valid for the next year.
2. DNS. Find where the nameservers point, and confirm you can log in to that account too. It is often different from the registrar.
3. Hosting. Confirm the account is in the company's name and billed to a company card, and that you can log in without asking the agency.
4. Code. Ask where the code lives. If it is a Git repository, ask to be made an owner. If the only copy is on the server, ask for a full backup and keep it.
5. CMS. Make sure at least one administrator account belongs to a company role address, not to the agency or a former employee.
6. Accounts. Check that the company is an owner, not just a user, in Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile, Tag Manager and the email admin console.
7. Licences. List every paid theme, plugin, font and stock library, with the account it is bought under and the renewal date.

Store every login in a company password manager, turn on two-factor authentication everywhere it is offered, and replace any shared or weak password with a long unique one from the password generator.

What should you do if something is in someone else's name?

Ask, in writing, and be specific. List each item, say what you want (transfer of the domain into your account, ownership of the repository, owner access to analytics), and give a reasonable date. Most agencies and former staff cooperate when asked plainly; the problems usually come from nobody having asked.

For the code, the cleanest route is a repository transfer, which keeps the full history. If there is no repository, a full server backup of a WordPress site contains everything you need. For a compiled site or app, you need the source code, not just what is deployed. How to hand over a website to a new agency lists every item to collect and the order to collect it in.

Some fights are not worth having. If the site is ten years old and you plan to rebuild it anyway, get the domain, the content and the analytics history, and leave the old theme code where it is. Spend the effort on making sure the new build starts in your name from day one.

Ownership is the first item in any maintenance routine because every other task depends on it. The website maintenance guide covers the rest of that routine once the accounts are yours.