Who owns
your website.

[Written by the Gleed studio · Last checked 31.08.2026]

1. [01]

   A website is not one thing to own

   People say my website and mean one object. It is at least three, each held by a different party in a different system, and a studio can hand you one of them while holding the other two without ever saying an untrue word.

   • The code and the design. The files the site is built from. Under copyright these belong to whoever wrote them unless a contract says otherwise, and we built it for you is not a contract saying otherwise.
   • The domain. A registration in somebody’s name at a registrar, renewed annually. It is the one piece that decides whether your email keeps working, and it is the piece most often registered on the agency’s own account to keep it simple.
   • The accounts the site runs on. Hosting, analytics, the ad account, the payment processor, the mailing list. Each is a login owned by whoever created it, and years of data sit behind them.

   The fourth thing, and the one nobody thinks to ask about, is whether the site can exist away from the people who built it at all. A site assembled inside a proprietary platform is not transferable by argument: there is nothing to hand over but an export of the text.

2. [02]

   How to check, on the site you already have

   This takes about ten minutes and does not require asking anybody a question they might answer carefully.

   • Look up the domain. Search for a public WHOIS or RDAP record for it. Privacy services hide the name, so the more useful test is the practical one: do you have a login to the registrar yourself, and does the account recovery email go to an address you control?
   • Open the analytics and ad accounts. Look at the user list. If your address is not there with administrator rights, you are a guest on your own numbers, and access can be withdrawn by the person who invited you.
   • Ask where the code lives. A repository you can be added to, a hosting account with your card on it, or on our server. The third answer is the one to follow up.
   • Read what you signed. Look for the words assign, transfer or licence. A licence is permission to use something somebody else still owns, and permission can have conditions — including that it ends when the invoices do.
3. [03]

   What a contract has to say for the answer to be you

   You own your website on a marketing page commits nobody. What binds is a sentence naming the thing, the moment and the party. Three of them, and they are short:

   • The code is assigned to you, and when. Not licensed, not available on request. Assigned, with a date — usually at final payment, which is fair to both sides and unambiguous to both.
   • The domain and the accounts are registered in your name. Not transferred later on request. Registered in your name from the start, because a transfer somebody has to be willing to perform is a transfer that can be delayed.
   • Nothing is conditional on staying. If ownership is worded so that it depends on an active retainer, it is not ownership. It is a subscription with a strong closing paragraph.

   Notice what none of that requires: a lawyer, a long document, or a negotiation. Three sentences in the quote you are already being sent. A studio that will not put them there has told you the answer.

4. [04]

   What it says here

   The same on every package. Not a feature of the expensive one, and not a thing you ask for — the 4 rows on the pricing page differ in scope, price and turnaround and in nothing else:

   Your code, your domain, your accounts — yours from day one. The studio registers nothing in its own name and keeps no part of the work hostage: at handover the code, the domain and every account the site runs on are in your name and under your control. That is true whether or not you stay on a monthly plan afterwards.

   That is clause six of the offer — the document an account ticks a box to agree to, not a line invented for this page. It is also the reason the studio sells a monthly plan rather than an obligation: the plans are worth paying for while they are worth paying for, and the day they are not, leaving costs you a password change rather than a rebuild.

5. [05]

   If you are locked out right now

   Assume nothing hostile until you have asked plainly. Most of these end with somebody sending a login they never thought about.

   • Ask for administrator access, in writing, by name. The domain registration, the hosting account, the analytics property, the ad account, the repository. Listing them separately is what stops the answer being you have access.
   • Recover what you can yourself. A registrar will usually work with the registrant email address on the record. If that address is yours, you are further along than you think.
   • Export before you argue. Content, product lists, customer records, the mailing list. Whatever the ownership answer turns out to be, having your own data changes what happens next.
   • Price the rebuild before you fight for the code. Sometimes a site built on a platform you cannot leave is not worth the recovery, and the honest move is to rebuild the site while keeping the domain and the audience. That is a business decision rather than a legal one.
6. [06]

   The paragraph to put in your next quote

   Copy this into the next quote you are asked to approve, whoever it is from. It is not adversarial and no studio that intends to hand the work over has a reason to refuse it.

   On final payment, all rights in the code, design files and content produced under this quote are assigned to the client. The domain and every account the site runs on — hosting, analytics, advertising and payments — are registered in the client’s name, and the client holds administrator access to each from the day it is created. None of the above depends on any ongoing agreement.

   If the answer is yes, you have lost nothing. If the answer is a conversation, you have learned something worth more than the quote.