Before you hire anyone to build your website, there’s a plain question worth asking, and a surprising number of people forget to: when it’s done, what do you actually own? If you and the person who built it parted ways tomorrow, could you take your site and carry on, or would you be stuck?
We think the answer should always be the simple one. You own it. All of it. Here’s what that means in practice, because “you own it” is easy to say and worth pinning down.
The domain
Your domain name - the yourbusiness.com part - should be registered in your account, in your name, with you holding the login. We’re glad to set it up for you, but it goes under your roof, not ours. Your domain is your address and your email; it’s the last thing you ever want to be locked out of, or renting from someone else without realizing it.
The code and the content
The website itself - the code, the pages, the words, the images we made for the project - is yours when we’re done. We build on tools anyone can host, so you’re never tied to us to keep the lights on. If you wanted to hand the whole thing to another developer next year, you could, and they’d be able to pick it up without a treasure hunt.
That’s not how all of the industry works, which is the reason we mention it. Plenty of setups are built so that leaving is painful by design - the site lives inside one company’s platform, and walking away means rebuilding from nothing. We wrote about that trap in the hidden cost of page builders. Owning your site outright is the opposite of that, on purpose.
The accounts
Anything we set up around the site - the hosting, the analytics, a form service, whatever the project needs - goes into accounts that belong to you, with you as the owner and us added as helpers if you’d like the help. The bills are in your name and the keys are in your hand. Nothing important sits in an account only we can reach.
What handoff looks like
When a project wraps, you don’t just get a link to the finished site. You get the logins, a plain rundown of what’s set up where, and enough of a guide that you or anyone you bring on later can find their way around. The goal is that you could keep going entirely without us.
That last line sounds funny coming from the people who’d like to keep working with you. But it’s the whole point. We’d rather you stay because the work is good and you want to, than because leaving was made too costly to bother. A client who’s free to walk and chooses not to is the only kind worth having.
If you’re talking to anyone about building your site - us or otherwise - ask them this directly, and listen for whether the answer is simple. If it isn’t, that tells you something. And if you want to know exactly how we hand things over, just ask; we’ll walk you through it before you commit to anything.
