Who actually owns your website

Most principals can tell you what the firm pays for professional indemnity cover and the month it renews. Ask the same person whose name the domain is registered in and the answer usually tails off into somebody half remembered from 2012.

That is not carelessness. A website gets commissioned once, it works, and then it goes quiet for a decade. Nothing ever prompts you to check it. But it is an asset with an owner, an address, a set of keys and a spare copy, and if any of those four sit outside your firm, you do not own a website. You have the use of one, for as long as someone else feels like letting you.

Four questions. None of them technical, all of them answerable this week.

Whose name is on the domain?

Start with a WHOIS lookup. Nominet, the registry for .uk addresses, runs a public one; for a .com, the registrar you pay each year will show the account holder. What you are looking for is the registrant: the legal owner of the address on your boards, your business cards and every email your staff send.

It should be the firm's own name on it. Anything else, whether that is an agency or a helpful chap called Dave, means the address belongs to somebody who is not you.

If the name is not yours, you are a tenant on your own address. Say the developer registered it back in 2011 on his personal account and his personal card. He winds the business down. The renewal notice goes to an inbox nobody reads. The domain lapses, and because your email runs on the same domain, the email stops too. Applicant enquiries bounce. Landlords assume you have ignored them, and you find out from a tenant. There is normally a window to recover a lapsed domain, and it is neither cheap nor certain.

Fixing this while everyone is still on speaking terms costs an afternoon. Fixing it afterwards can cost you the address.

Where does it live, and who is paying for it?

Pull twelve months of bank statements and look for small recurring payments to company names nobody in the office recognises. Hosting is usually annual, sometimes monthly, and it is small enough to survive every cost review you have ever done. Ask whoever does the books to flag every repeating payment under £200 a year and read the list out loud. Somebody will recognise a name.

If money leaves and nobody knows why, you have found the direct debit that keeps the lights on. Nobody dares cancel it, which is the correct instinct, but it means one company you cannot name is holding your entire web presence.

If nothing leaves your account at all, that is the worse result. Someone else is paying. That means someone else holds the account and the password, and gets to decide when the arrangement ends. Their goodwill is your uptime. When a bookkeeper somewhere tidies up an old card subscription, your site goes dark and no one at your firm gets an email about it.

Can you get in without asking anyone?

There are usually five sets of credentials behind a website: the domain registrar, the DNS records, the hosting account, whatever system the pages are edited in, and the email. Test all five on a quiet Thursday, while nothing is wrong. Log in properly, not from a saved browser session. Then check where a password reset would be sent, because a reset going to an address at a company that closed in 2019 is the same as no access.

If the only working login belongs to someone outside the firm, every change you ever want to make now depends on them answering the phone.

Access and control are not the same thing. Plenty of firms have every password and still cannot change a word, because the site was built in software that no longer exists. Serif WebPlus, a desktop web builder that was popular with small UK firms, shipped its last version in 2016, and on 31 August 2018 the online services those sites depended on were switched off for good. A site built with it is a frozen export from a program you cannot buy, and no amount of logins will thaw it. That problem, and how to tell if you have it, is worth reading about separately.

If your site carries property details and you cannot correct them when the facts change, you have a gap between what you publish and what you know. A site you can edit yourself makes that easier to stay on top of, though the duty to get the information right sits with your firm rather than your web host. We wrote about what the material information rules ask of you in more detail.

If it disappeared tonight, what would you restore from?

Twenty years of a firm's public face tends to exist in exactly one place: the live server. The photography, the office histories, the case notes on schemes you completed in 2014, the wording your solicitor approved. All of it sitting behind one account somebody set up once.

Ask for a copy of the site as a file you can hold. A folder you can put on the office drive, with a note saying what is in it. A login to somebody else's control panel is a different thing entirely. Most hosts keep a rolling backup, but it is their backup, held on their terms, and it disappears with the account that pays for it. A backup you cannot reach is not a backup.

If the honest answer is "the developer has it", you have no backup. You have a favour, owed by someone who is under no obligation to remember.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine will sometimes have old versions of your pages, which is better than nothing and considerably worse than a real copy. Text often survives. Photographs and PDFs frequently do not.

What a proper handover contains

When a site is rebuilt, the design is the part everyone looks at. The part that decides whether you own the thing afterwards is the paperwork. Ask for the domain registered to the firm in an account the firm controls, the hosting in the firm's own name with the firm's own card, a written note of every service involved and what each one costs, and a copy of the site handed over as files. If a proposal does not include those, you are about to buy the same problem again in a newer typeface.

Run the four questions on your own firm first. If the answers come back worse than you expected, tell us what you found and we will price the repair.