Do I own my website? Five checks for UK businesses worried their agency has them locked in

What owning your website means

If you're asking "do I own my website?", start with UK law. The agency that built your site owns the copyright in its design and code unless it has signed a written assignment to you. Your domain belongs to whoever is named as its registrant. Paying the invoice changes neither.

This guide is for UK business owners who suspect their agency has them locked in. It covers five checks, each with its fix, and you can run most of them this week without asking the agency for anything.

At The Spiral we boil the five down to one question, which we call the leaving test. If your agency disappeared tomorrow, could a new developer keep the site running with nothing from them? A yes means you own your website in the way that matters. It's also the standard we hold our own website design and development work to.

The five checks at a glance

The first two decide who owns what on paper. The last three decide whether you can leave in practice.

Check 1: who owns your domain name

The domain is the one part you can't rebuild. Your address, the links pointing at it and the email running through it all belong to the registrant, the person or company named on the registration. Nominet, which runs the .uk registry, calls the registrant the domain name owner.

For a .uk domain, search Nominet's domain lookup. It shows the registrar (the company the domain was bought through) and the renewal date, but it hides the registrant's name by default. To see whose name is on it, log into the registrar account, or into Nominet Online Services, which uses the domain's admin contact email as its login.

You pass if your company is the registrant, the contact email is one you control, and the domain renews on your card. The usual failure is a domain bought on the agency's account, in the agency's name.

For a .uk domain, the fix is a registrant transfer. As the current registrant, the agency starts it. Through Nominet Online Services it costs £10 plus VAT, and you have five days to accept.

For a .com, ICANN's lookup shows the registrar, and the registrant is usually hidden there too. The agency changes the registrant at its registrar. Once the name is yours, the registrar must give you the transfer code within five calendar days of asking. A change of registrant can lock a .com to its registrar for 60 days, so change the name first and move later.

Check 2: who holds the copyright

Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the author of a work is its first owner. The exception is your own staff, whose work in the course of their job belongs to you. An agency isn't your staff, so the design and code it produced start out as its property, however much you paid.

The UK Intellectual Property Office gives the same warning. Its advice is to agree in a contract, before work starts, that copyright passes to your business. And a transfer only counts if it's in writing and signed by the agency.

So look in your contract or the agency's terms for the word "assign". A "licence" is weaker: permission to use the site on the agency's terms. A clause that assigns copyright on final payment is normal and fair, as long as it exists.

If nothing was signed, you're not automatically stuck. In a dispute over the Dr Martens logo, the courts found the client was the owner in equity, although the designer held the copyright on paper. But that's an argument you'd have to win, and a signed page costs an honest agency nothing.

Paid themes, plugins and stock photos can't be assigned at all, because the agency only licensed them, and the licence may sit on its own account. Ask for a list of every paid licence, whose name it's in, and whether it transfers.

Check 3: a copy of the site someone else could run

Copyright is little use without the site itself. This check is the leaving test at its most literal. Could a developer who has never met your agency take your copy and put the site back up on new hosting?

What counts as a copy depends on how the site was built.

• For a custom-built site, it's the code repository (on GitHub or GitLab) in an organisation your company owns, with the agency invited as members.
• For WordPress, it's a full backup of the files and the database. The files alone aren't the site, because your pages and settings live in the database.
• For a hosted builder such as Wix, no copy exists that runs anywhere else, and Wix says its sites can't use another host. You keep the domain and your content, and the design stays behind.
• For a site on the agency's own content system, ask whether any export exists. If the answer is "content only", leaving means a rebuild, and it's better to know that now.

Ask for the copy while the relationship is good. An agency that's confident in its work hands it over as routine. One that asks why you want it is telling you something.

Check 4: whose name is on each account

Every tool around your website has an owner level and a user level. You want the owner level in your company's name, with the agency added as a user you can remove. The reverse is the quiet form of lock-in: the site is yours on paper, but the agency holds the keys to everything that runs it.

• The hosting account should be in your company's name and billed to your card. If the agency hosts the site in its own account, check 3 matters twice as much.
• You need your own administrator login to the site's admin area, not a shared password the agency can change.
• In Google Search Console, be a verified owner yourself. Owners can add and remove other users, and if every verified owner is removed, everyone else loses access after a grace period. If the agency is the only verified owner, you can be shut out of your own search data until you verify the site yourself.
• In Google Analytics, your company should hold the Administrator role, the one that can manage users.
• Whoever controls your DNS (the settings that say where the domain points) controls where your email goes. Know where it's managed, and have a login.
• Then the rest: your Google Business Profile, booking tools and anything else wired into the site.

Adding you as an owner is a small job for whoever holds each account today, so ask for all of them in one email.

Check 5: what leaving costs under your contract

Read your contract for the notice period, any buy-out price, and what the agency must hand over when you go. If none of that is written down, you'll negotiate it at the worst moment, when you're already leaving.

Pay-monthly websites need the closest read, because some rent you the site rather than sell it. The fair version puts the price of leaving in writing before you sign, so you can decide with your eyes open. The version to avoid sets that price on the day you ask. If you're comparing offers now, our guide to what sets the price of a website in the UK covers what a proper quote should list.

If you're about to sign or renew with any agency, including us, ask for five lines in writing:

1. Copyright in the site assigns to your company on final payment.
2. The domain is registered in your company's name.
3. Every account sits in your company's name, with the agency added as a user.
4. On request, the agency hands over a full working copy within an agreed number of days.
5. Every paid licence is listed, with whose name it's in and whether it transfers.

If your agency won't hand things over

Start with one polite email that lists every missing item from the five checks and gives a date. Keep it factual, because you may need it later. If that doesn't work, protect things in this order.

1. The domain comes first. If your company is already the registrant and the contact email is yours, you can move the domain to a registrar you choose through Nominet Online Services. It costs £10 plus VAT and needs nothing from the agency.
2. Don't cancel hosting until you hold a working copy, or you may have nothing left to move.
3. Copy every DNS record before anyone changes where the domain points, especially the MX records that route your email. Miss them and your team stops receiving email.
4. If the domain is in the agency's name and it refuses to transfer it, the cost goes up. Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service needs you to hold rights such as a trade mark in the name, and a win isn't guaranteed. At that point, talk to a solicitor who handles intellectual property disputes. This post isn't legal advice.

When you don't need to worry, or to rebuild

Not every gap is a crisis, and not every crisis needs a new website.

If you're happy with your agency, you don't need to leave to fix this. Ownership is insurance, not an accusation. Ask for the missing pieces as routine housekeeping, and a good agency will sort them without fuss.

If your site runs on Wix or a similar builder, the lock-in belongs to the platform, and for a small brochure site that can be a fair trade. Put the domain in your name and move on. On a pay-monthly deal with the buy-out price in writing, you already know what leaving costs.

If your site passes check 3, whatever else fails is paperwork: a registrant transfer, a signed assignment, a new owner on an account. None of it means touching the site.

A rebuild makes sense only when the site runs on a system you can't take with you, or has other problems worth fixing at the same time. If you're weighing one, get an audit first. When we're asked to take over a site, we start with an audit and a written recommendation, and we'll tell you if rebuilding isn't the better path.

What a clean handover looks like

Our own standard is on our homepage. Your domain, hosting, code repository and documentation sit in your accounts. We build on our own infrastructure while the work is under way, then transfer everything at handover.

The site itself is yours: the design, the code and the words we write for it. Our name appears as the studio that built it, and that credit is all we keep.

Monitoring and maintenance after launch are optional and agreed at handover. They're never a condition of owning the site.

Access isn't enough on its own, because a site you can't edit without phoning the agency is yours on paper only. So we build a content model your team can edit without breaking the layout, and documentation another developer could pick up.

Most of our work is cross-border, including websites for a London damp proofing specialist and a London builder. What those two projects taught us about trades websites is in websites for builders and tradespeople. A handover has to work without anyone visiting an office, which is one reason we put everything in writing, as our guide to working with a software studio in Albania explains.

An agency that keeps the keys is betting you can't tell being looked after from being stuck. This post is the list we'd want any client to check us against.

This week, look up your domain on Nominet's lookup and find your contract. Those two checks take minutes, and they answer the two questions that are hardest to fix later.

Questions

My web designer has disappeared. Can I still get my website back?

If the domain is in your company's name and you can reach its contact email, yes. Log into Nominet Online Services, move the domain to a registrar you choose, and point it at new hosting. The site is harder. Without a copy of the code or a backup, a new developer may have to rebuild it. If the domain is in the designer's name, talk to Nominet's support team and a solicitor before the renewal date passes.

Who owns the text and photos on my website?

Text you or your staff wrote is yours, and so are photos you took. Copy the agency wrote follows the same rule as the design, so it's theirs unless your contract assigns it. Stock photos are licensed rather than owned, and the licence may be in the agency's name, so check it before you reuse them elsewhere.

Will moving to new hosting hurt my Google rankings?

If the domain and the page addresses stay the same, only the hosting changes. Google calls a temporary dip in crawling normal after a hosting change, followed by a steady increase over the next few days. A rebuild that changes page addresses is different, because each old address then needs a permanent redirect to its new one.

How we wrote this: drafted with AI, then checked and edited by the people who build our projects. Figures come from our own work or from the linked sources.