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

Every month someone gets in touch who has fallen out with a web designer, or lost touch with one, and wants to know whether they can take their website with them. The answer is nearly always “parts of it”, and the parts are the problem. A website is not one thing. It is four things, held in four places, and they can each belong to someone different. Here is how to find out where you stand today and how to make sure the answer is “all of it” in future.

The four things

The domain is the name, like yourbusiness.co.uk. It is rented by the year from a registrar, and the person or company named as the registrant controls it.

Email at that domain, like hello@yourbusiness.co.uk, is a separate service. It is usually with a different company from the website, and it depends entirely on the domain.

The code and design are what the site is built from: the templates, the layout, the styling, and anything written specially for it. Under UK copyright law, this has an owner, and it is often not you.

The content is your words, your photos, your logo, your prices and your reviews. Some of it is yours automatically. Some of it, surprisingly, is not.

The domain: the one that matters most

If you keep nothing else, keep the domain. Whoever controls it controls where your website and your email go. A designer who holds the domain can, deliberately or by letting it lapse, take your site and your email offline on the same day.

For .uk names, the rules come from Nominet, the registry. Its registrant terms are a contract between Nominet and the registrant, the person or company recorded against the domain, with the registrar acting on the registrant’s instructions. The registrant is the one with the rights. If your designer registered the domain and put their own company as the registrant, then as far as Nominet is concerned it is their domain, whatever your invoice says. For .com and other endings the same principle applies under the relevant registry’s rules.

How to check today. Run a lookup on your domain name. Nominet publishes one for .uk names on its website, and every other registry has an equivalent. Look at the registrant. If it is your name or your company, good. If it is the designer, a hosting company, or “Private” with no account you can log in to, you have a job to do.

What to do about it. Ask the designer to change the registrant to you, or to move the domain into a registrar account in your name. Any reputable designer will do this without fuss. If they refuse, your contract and invoices are the evidence, and Nominet runs a dispute service for .uk names. Do not let it drift: a domain that lapses can be bought by anyone.

In future. Register the domain yourself, in your own account, with your own card on the renewal, and give the designer the access they need. It takes ten minutes and it is the single most useful thing in this article.

Email: the thing that breaks

Business email usually runs through a provider such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, pointed at your domain by a couple of settings. Two things go wrong. The first is that the email account is in the designer’s name, so when you part ways you lose the mailbox and every message in it. The second is that the settings that point the domain at the email provider are only understood by one person, so a change to the website takes the email down.

Check who the account holder is for the email service. If it is not you, move it. And when you change web designer or host, say in the first conversation that email must keep working through the move, and ask them to confirm they have looked at the settings before they touch anything.

The code and design: the surprise

Here is the part most owners do not expect. In the UK, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says the first owner of copyright in a work is its author, with an exception for employees, whose employer owns what they make in the course of their job. There is no exception for a customer who pays. Commissioning and paying for a website does not, by itself, transfer the copyright in the code or the design to you. The designer owns it unless a written agreement says otherwise.

In practice this matters in two situations: when you want to take the site to another host and the designer says no, and when the designer wants to reuse the design for someone else. Both are avoided with one sentence in the contract.

What to put in writing. Ask for a clause that assigns the copyright in the site’s code, design and any assets made for it to you on final payment, with a licence to use it until then. Our own terms say exactly that: the website, its code and its assets become yours when the final payment is made. Any supplier who will not agree to something similar is telling you something.

The exception that is fine. A site built on a platform like Shopify or Squarespace uses that platform’s templates and software, which you rent and never own. That is normal and not a trap, as long as you own the domain and can export your content. Likewise, open-source software that a developer used is covered by its own licence and nobody is assigning it to anyone. What you should own is the work done specifically for you.

The content: mostly yours, with gaps

Words you wrote, photos you took, and your logo if you designed it or paid a designer with a proper agreement, are yours. The gaps are:

• Copy the designer wrote. Same rule as the code: the author owns it unless assigned. Include it in the same clause.
• Photos a photographer took. The photographer owns the copyright by default. Agree in writing what you can use them for, and get the original files.
• Stock photos. These are licensed, often to the designer’s account, and the licence may not travel with the site. Ask.
• Reviews. Reviews on Google belong to Google’s platform and stay with your Business Profile, which is another reason to make sure that profile is in your own account.
• Your logo from a cheap online tool. Check the terms. Some of those tools give you a licence, not ownership, and you may not be able to trademark it.

Keep a folder, on your own computer or drive, with the original files for everything: logo, photos, the text of every page. If the site vanished tomorrow, you should be able to rebuild it from that folder.

While we are here: what the site has to show

Ownership questions tend to come up alongside legal ones, so here is the short version of what a UK business must display. A limited company must show its registered name, registered number, place of registration and registered office address on its website; the list is on GOV.UK. Any business selling or offering services online must also make its name, geographic address, an email address, and its VAT number if it has one, easy to find, under regulation 6 of the Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002, which also says prices must be clear about whether they include tax and delivery. The footer is the usual place for all of it. If your designer left these off, add them; it is a ten-minute job and it is not optional.

The checklist

Before you sign with anyone, or today if you already have a site:

1. The domain is registered with you as the registrant, in an account you control, with your card on the renewal.
2. The email service is in your name, and you know who to ask about the settings.
3. The contract assigns the code, design and copy to you on final payment.
4. You have the original files for your logo, photos and text in your own folder.
5. You can log in to your Google Business Profile.
6. The footer shows your company details and an email address.

Six lines. Most of the sad stories we hear would have been prevented by the first one.

If you are choosing a supplier now, the questions in how much a website costs include these, and hosting and care, explained covers what happens to ownership when a site is hosted for you. If you are moving away from a designer and want the site rebuilt somewhere you own, we can do that, and the quote is fixed in writing.