Who owns your website? Paying for the domain doesn’t put it in your name

Every year an invoice for the domain arrives, and every year you pay it. Your company name is on it, so the question of who owns your website seems settled. Yet the registrant of the domain may be the contractor, who once registered it in their own name and simply passes the cost on to you.

The easiest time to check is now, while everything works and your contractor is easy to talk to. Asking for logins feels normal at that point, and the answer comes the same day. What happens when you have to do it at the end of a working relationship is covered in What leaving a contractor costs.

Who owns your website, and who only has a login

To a customer, a website is an address and whatever appears after typing it in. Underneath there are separate things, and each has its own owner and its own login. The domain sits with a registrar, the server with a hosting company. The code lives in a repository, or only on the server. Photos and fonts come with licences. On top of that come your Google accounts and the email on your company domain.

All of it can be yours. All of it can also be in the contractor’s name and run for years without trouble. The trouble starts when something has to change and the person with the login does not pick up the phone.

The domain and who the registrant really is

For .pl domains, the public WHOIS lookup at dns.pl shows the registrant type, meaning whether it is a private person or a company. It also shows the registrar, the registration date and the renewal date. It does not show the registrant’s name. We checked this ourselves on 22 October 2026. Other domain endings have their own rules, so the safest place to look is always the account at the registrar.

That is where you see the registrant. Ask your contractor where the domain is registered, and ask for your own login or for the domain to be moved to your account. If the registrar shows registrant details in the account, your company’s details should be there.

The WHOIS result also lists the name servers. They decide where your website address points and where your email goes. If they point to your contractor’s server, the contractor decides where your site runs, even when the domain itself is in your name.

While you are at it, look at the renewal date and ask whose card pays for it. A domain nobody renewed in time stops working, and your email stops with it.

Hosting, code and the admin panel

The hosting account should be set up on your own email address. Then password resets and invoices come to you, not to an inbox nobody reads.

Code is a separate matter. A copy of the files from the server is not the same as a repository with its history of changes. Ask for access to the repository even if you never plan to open it. You should also have your own administrator account in the site’s admin panel, not a shared login that belongs to the contractor.

Photos, fonts and copyright

Who holds the copyright to the code and the graphics is a question for a lawyer, with your contract in hand. Ask whether the contract transfers the economic rights to you or only gives you a licence, and for which uses. Ask separately about the logo, if it was designed as part of the job.

Stock photos come with licences. A licence is usually bought on the account of whoever downloads the photo, and that is often the contractor. Ask where the photos on your site come from and whose account the licences were bought on, and ask for the purchase confirmations. What such a licence means for you is also worth checking with a lawyer.

Fonts work in a similar way. Some are free, others need a licence with its own terms. Simply ask your contractor which fonts they used and where they got them.

Google Business Profile, Search Console and email

Sometimes these accounts are set up “while we’re at it” on the contractor’s address, and getting them back later takes time. For each one, check that you are the owner and the contractor has access at most.

• Google Business Profile. A profile can have several owners but only one primary owner. A manager can do almost everything except add or remove people and remove the profile. The primary owner should be you.
• Google Search Console. An owner has full control and is the one who adds and removes users. Your contractor can have access, but the owner should be you.
• Google Analytics. Adding or changing users requires the Administrator role. It should sit on your own Google account.
• Email on your company domain. Ask where the mailboxes are hosted and who has the administrator account. Whoever has it can usually reset the password of any mailbox in your company.

Make one document that lists each of these things, where it is, whose name it is in and who has the login. Keep it yourself, not in your contractor’s inbox. The domain expiry date and a few other things are also checked by our free website scan.