louislynn Journal
Do You Own Your Website? How to Check in Ten Minutes
Many small businesses do not own the website they pay for. How to check who holds your domain, DNS, hosting, and analytics, and what to do if the answer is not you.
Plenty of business owners pay for a website every month for years and own none of it. They find out on the day they try to leave.
It takes about ten minutes to check. Do it now rather than during a dispute.
The four things to verify
- The domain. Go to the registrar and try to log in with your own email. If you cannot, or you do not know which registrar it is, your domain is in someone else's account. This is the most serious one, because whoever holds the domain holds everything.
- The DNS. Whoever controls DNS controls where your website and your email point. Sometimes it sits with the registrar, sometimes elsewhere entirely.
- The hosting or platform account. Is the subscription billed to your card, under your email? Or does the agency own the account and bill you a marked-up fee?
- Analytics and Search Console. Are you an owner, or were you never added at all? Years of historical data live here and they do not transfer if you lose access.
What good looks like
Every one of those accounts registered to your email, billed to your card, with your agency added as a user you can remove. That is the arrangement. Anything else is a relationship you cannot exit cleanly.
Ownership is an account question
A hosted platform is fine. We put clients on Squarespace and Webflow regularly and they run beautifully. Ownership lives in the account name and the billing card. Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress: the platform has no say in it.
An agency-held domain on an excellent platform is worse for you than your own domain on a mediocre one.
If the answer is not you
Ask for a transfer in writing, politely and specifically: domain authorization code (the EPP code), DNS access, and ownership of the analytics properties. Most providers comply. Some stall, and the stalling tells you what the relationship was.
This is the first thing we fix in any rebuild. Our client Outback Construction was on a rented platform that held their pages and their DNS. We moved the domain to a registrar they control and verified Search Console the same night. Domain rating went from 0.5 to 11 in three weeks once the foundation was theirs.