Who holds the keys to your website?

It’s one of the most common stories: someone built your website years ago, everything worked, and one day they stop answering the phone. Then the domain expires, or the email stops, or you just want to change a photo, and you find out everything is in their name and behind their passwords.

You don’t need to be technical to avoid it. You need to know what to ask, and to ask while everything is going well.

What should be yours

• The domain. Your site’s address, your “name” on the internet. You should be the owner, with your business name and tax number, and your own email. If the contact email belongs to the builder, every important notice, such as the code you need to move the domain elsewhere, goes to them.
• Your business email. Your info@ lives on the domain. Whoever controls the domain settings can, even by accident, cut off your email. The account that manages your email should be in your name.
• Your Google profile. Your business profile on Google Maps and Search Console, the tool that shows how Google sees your site. You should be the owner, and the builder a manager. If they leave, you remove them with one click.
• Your data. Texts, photos, customer list, orders. Ask from day one how you get a copy, in a format that opens elsewhere too.

The website’s code is a separate conversation and depends on your agreement. But the things above can’t be rebuilt: a lost name, an email with years of contacts, a profile with your reviews. Those should never hang on one person.

Why they end up in someone else’s name

Usually not out of bad intent. The builder wants to finish quickly, you don’t want to deal with it, and the easiest path is to set everything up from their own account. It works perfectly until the day you need something and they aren’t there.

It’s reasonable for the builder to handle the technical side. Most owners never want to open a domain’s settings. But manager and owner are different things. The manager works for you. The owner decides.

How to check

1. Message whoever built your site and ask for three things in writing: whose name the domain is registered in, with which company, and when it expires. Whoever has the details can answer within minutes.

2. Open your Google profile and see who the owner is. If you have no access at all, that’s the first thing to fix.

3. Ask how you get a copy of your data. If the answer is “why do you want it?”, take note.

4. Write it all down in one place of your own, not the builder’s: where the domain is, when it expires, who has access to what.

If they’ve already disappeared

This is where the name matters. If the domain is in your name, the company it’s registered with can give you control once you prove you’re the owner. It takes documents and some patience, but it can be done. If it’s in their name, recovery is much harder and often goes through a lawyer.

And one practical thing: don’t let the domain expire while you sort it out. A domain that expires and isn’t renewed can, after a while, be taken by anyone.

When I build a site, you buy the domain yourself, in your name, and you get your data whenever you ask for it. If you don’t know which of the above is in your name today, write to me. We’ll find out together, whether I build anything for you or not.