A lot of business owners find out who owns their website on the worst possible day. The developer stops replying, the site goes down, and the hosting company will only talk to the person whose name is on the account. That person is rarely the owner of the business.
Each check below takes a few minutes. Run them before you sign with any developer. Us included.
1. The domain name
Your domain is the one part of the site you can’t rebuild. If it expires, or sits in someone else’s registrar account, you can lose the address your customers type, your email and every link pointing at you.
Don’t rely on a WHOIS lookup to tell you. Most registrars hide owner details behind privacy protection now, so the result tells you very little. The reliable test is whether you can log in to the registrar yourself. If you can’t, you don’t control the domain. Ask for it to be moved into an account in your company’s name, on an email address you’ll still have in five years, with auto-renew switched on.
2. Hosting and backups
The host stores your files and your database. Developers often put clients on their own reseller account because it’s cheaper and easier to manage. That arrangement works fine until the relationship ends.
You should have your own login, and the invoices should come to you. While you’re in there, find the backups. Check how often they run, then download one and open it. If the file is empty or won’t unzip, you want to learn that today, with the site still up.
3. DNS
DNS decides where your domain points: the website, your email, and the records Google uses to confirm you own the site. It might be managed at your registrar, at your host or at a service like Cloudflare, and plenty of owners have no idea which.
Find out, and get a login. If someone moves your nameservers without copying every record across, the website and the email can disappear in the same afternoon. When a site that “nobody touched” suddenly goes offline, this is often why.
4. The WordPress admin account
You need an Administrator account on your own email address. A shared login called “admin” that the developer set up doesn’t count, because you can’t tell who else is using it.
In WordPress, go to Users and filter by Administrator. If the only administrator is your developer, they decide who else gets in. Add yourself, then keep their access for as long as they are working on the site and remove it when they finish.
5. Google Analytics and Search Console
Years of traffic data are worth more than the site design. They show which pages bring in enquiries, and you can’t recreate them later.
In Google Analytics, open Admin, then Property access management, and check that you are listed as an Administrator. In Search Console, open Settings, then Users and permissions. You want to be an Owner. A Full user can see everything but can’t add or remove anyone, which leaves the account in somebody else’s hands.
6. Themes, plugins and licences
Premium themes and plugins are licensed to whoever bought them. When a developer’s licence lapses, the updates stop. Out-of-date plugins are one of the most common ways attackers get into WordPress sites.
Ask for a list of every paid plugin and the account each licence belongs to. If the theme was built for you, ask for the source files as well. A Git repository you can open is ideal. A zip file emailed at the end of the project is still far better than nothing.
7. Email on your domain
If your email uses the same domain as the site, it depends on the DNS records from point 3. Check that the mailbox accounts sit in your name and that you can reset their passwords without calling anyone. When email breaks, customer replies bounce quietly, and you usually find out when someone rings to ask why you never answered.
What a proper handover looks like
You should get all of this without asking for it: a single document listing every account, who it belongs to and how to log in. We put the domain, hosting and analytics in the client’s name from the first day of a web development project, and send a walkthrough video at the end so nobody has to remember how anything works.
If you aren’t sure who holds the keys to your current site, send us the address. We’ll tell you what to check first, free, whether you hire us or not.