Do You Own Your Website? What Happens When You Leave Your Web Company

Usually, partly. When you leave a web company, you almost always keep your domain name, the words on your site, and your photos. What you often lose is the design itself, especially if the site was built on a platform the company controls.

Whether you own the whole thing comes down to two things you can check before you sign: your contract, and where the site is built. This fall I rebuilt a site for a client who had about a month's notice that his old one was going away. Below is what came with him, what didn't, and how to avoid ending up in the same spot.

Do you own your website if you cancel?

It depends on whether you bought the site or rented it. If you paid little or nothing up front and pay monthly, you're usually leasing, and it's normal for the company to keep the design when you leave. If you paid a large lump sum, you should own the site outright.

Leasing isn't a bad deal on its own. It's a fair trade if it's priced like a lease and the contract says so plainly. A lease with no ownership date is fine when you didn't pay much up front.

What doesn't make sense is paying a large lump sum and still not owning your website. If you're paying like a buyer, you should walk away like one.

Where the site is built matters too. A site built inside a company's platform lives in their account. A hand-coded site is a set of files you can move anywhere. I break down those tradeoffs in Custom Code vs. WordPress.

What happens to your website when you leave your web company?

In most cases your content survives and the design doesn't. Your domain, text, photos and blog posts belong to your business and can be moved to a new site. The layout, styling and any features tied to the old company's platform usually stay behind, so plan on a new look even if nothing else is lost.

Here's how that played out for a client this fall. His marketing company told him his service was ending, and he had about a month. To keep the existing site, he'd have to open his own account on the platform it was built on and take over the setup himself.

That's a lot to learn on a deadline, and offboarding processes like that rarely end well. Some companies work hard to keep you locked in, and if you can't get out in time, you're left on your own.

He asked me if a month was enough. I said yes, put in extra hours, and his new site went live on October 31, right before the old service ended.

What came over: his domain, every page of text, every photo and all of his blog posts. Nothing was lost. The only thing left behind was the old design, which was being replaced anyway.

Timing matters because a site that goes dark costs more than most owners expect. Most of what a website does never shows up as a form submission, as I explain in Your Website Is Working. You Just Can't See It.

Will my Google rankings drop if I switch website companies?

Expect some movement, but usually not a lasting drop. Any rebuild shifts rankings for a while because Google has to re-crawl and re-evaluate the new pages. SEO generally takes three to six months to settle, and a well-built new site usually helps more than it hurts.

What protects you is keeping the same domain and carrying your content over. If a page's address changes in the move, the old address should redirect to the new one so visitors and Google land in the right place.

Speed is one place a rebuild can help right away. My client's old site scored 67 on Google's mobile PageSpeed test. The new one scores 95 on mobile. Why Website Speed Matters More Than You Think covers what that difference costs a business.

What do you own when you work with Out Shine Web Design?

If you pay the build fee, the site is yours: the code, the content and the domain. If you'd rather not pay up front, I also offer a lease option, and I'll tell you plainly which one you're signing up for before you sign.

Your domain usually stays wherever you already bought it, often GoDaddy. I use Cloudflare to point that domain at your site, so the domain stays in your name and your account.

If you ever leave, I hand over the code. You can host it anywhere you like, with all of your content intact.

Two things don't come along easily, and you should know them up front:

• Contact forms. Your forms run on my Cloudflare setup, so they'd stop working and you'd need a replacement.
• Upkeep. Hosting and maintaining a site yourself has a learning curve. It took me a long time to figure out the first time, which is a big part of why I handle it for clients on a monthly plan.

What red flags should you watch for before signing with a web company?

The biggest red flags are a contract you don't fully understand, a large up-front payment with no ownership, and a company that builds the same template for everyone. Any one of them can leave you paying for a website that isn't really yours or doesn't stand out.

• A contract that doesn't match the pitch. Read it before you sign. If anything doesn't line up with the deal you were told about, ask before you sign, not after.
• A big payment with no ownership. If you're paying thousands up front, the contract should say the site is yours.
• Volume shops. Some companies build sites for one industry by the hundreds. There's one that does this for nail salons, and the sites are rarely different from each other. At that point you've lost the reason to have a site made for you, because you don't stand out, and you could have built the same thing on Wix without the monthly bill. A company playing the volume game can't give your site real time or care.

What should you ask a web company before you sign?

Ask who owns the site, the domain and the content, and what happens to each one if you cancel. Get the answers in the contract, not just in a sales call. These six questions cover it:

1. Is this a purchase or a lease? If it's a lease, is there ever a point where I own it?
2. If I pay the build fee, is it in writing that I own the site?
3. Whose name is the domain registered under, and can I log into it?
4. What is the site built on, and would I need my own account on that platform to keep it?
5. If I cancel, what do I get, and in what form?
6. Will you help me move to a new provider, and what stops working when I leave?