Who owns my website?
You paid for it, so it must be yours — that is what most business owners believe, right up until the day they try to change something and find out they can't. A falling-out with the designer, a designer who disappears, a simple price change you cannot make yourself: that is usually the moment an owner learns the uncomfortable truth. Paying for a website does not automatically make you its legal owner, and the difference between owning your website and merely using it decides whether your business can move, grow, or even stay online.
What the law actually says
Under United States copyright law, the person who creates a work owns it — and that includes your website's design and its code. If a designer or a company built your site and there is no written agreement transferring those rights to you, the creator keeps the copyright. You may hold only an implied license: permission to use the site, not ownership of it. That means the business's most important storefront can legally belong to somebody else.
The pieces split apart, and each one matters:
- The domain name is not owned at all — it is rented, and it belongs to whoever's registrar account holds it. If your domain sits in your designer's account, your web address is in their hands, not yours.
- Your words and photos — the text you wrote and the pictures you supplied — are yours. You brought them; you own them.
- The design and code belong to the creator unless a signed agreement says otherwise.
- A site built on a closed platform like Wix or Squarespace can never be moved off that platform at all. Stop paying, or want a different builder later, and the site itself cannot come with you.
Why this is not a technicality
So what does this mean for your business on an ordinary Tuesday? It means the accounts are the business. If your designer holds the domain account, the hosting, and the site itself, a disagreement is no longer an inconvenience — it is a shutdown risk. Owners have lost their web address, their email, and years of Google ranking because the one login that controlled everything was never theirs. A website you cannot update, move, or hand to a new provider is not an asset. It is a dependency — and dependencies get expensive exactly when you can least afford them.
How we work instead
We set everything up on your own accounts, in your name, from the first day. When your finished site is ready and approved by you and the final payment is made, the site and the domain are handed over to you — and we keep no access afterward. Your business stays yours: you can update it, move it, or hand it to anyone you choose, because it was never locked to us.
What it costs here
Getting a domain properly into your name is printed work, like everything we publish:
- Domain Connection — $100. Your domain connected to your website, set up on your account.
- Domain Name Handled — $200. We handle your domain name for you — secured and registered in your name, under your control.
Not sure whose name your website and domain are really in? Text or email us — we answer fast. Text: (774) 666-1728 · Email: design@goddessisacrownsecrets.com Send us your website address, and we will help you work out what you actually own and what you only think you own.