Do you own your website, or are you renting it?

You own your website if your business holds the domain registration, the hosting account, the site's files and the written content, and the contract says those stay with you when the relationship ends. If any of those sit in a vendor's name or account, or the agreement grants you only a license to use the site while you keep paying, you are closer to renting. Often you can find out in an afternoon by checking a handful of logins and reading one section of your contract.

Both arrangements exist for understandable reasons. Some marketing vendors license the site to you rather than transfer it, sometimes bundled with hosting, updates and support for one monthly fee, and that can suit a business that wants no involvement at all. The trouble starts when an owner assumes the monthly fee buys the site and learns otherwise only on the way out.

This page is general information for business owners in any industry, not legal advice. Who owns website code, design and copy under copyright law depends on the facts and the contract, so take any specific question to your own attorney.

The pieces that make up ownership

Ownership comes as a bundle of separate pieces, and a business can hold some of them without the others. The table shows what each piece looks like on either side.

No single row settles the question. A business can hold its domain and still lose every page when it leaves, because the pages lived in a system it never controlled. Holding a login is not the same as holding the rights. And rights on paper do little good without the login that lets you use them.

What your registrar and Google accounts reveal

Start with the domain, since everything else points to it. ICANN's page on registrants' benefits and responsibilities says a registrant is entitled to accurate and accessible information about the identity of its ICANN-accredited registrar, and is entitled to review its registration agreement at any time and download a copy. If no one in your business can name the registrar that holds your domain, treat that as a finding in itself. Ask the vendor for the registrar's name and the registrant name on the record, then sign in yourself.

Next, look at Google Search Console. Google's help page on managing owners describes a verified owner, who proved ownership with a token placed on the site, and a delegated owner, who was granted ownership by a verified owner without a token. Full users and restricted users can view data, while owners are the ones who add or remove other owners. If your business shows up only as a user, someone else decides who holds ownership of your search data. Google Analytics follows a similar pattern: its help page says adding or changing users requires the Administrator role.

A short internal check helps before you contact anyone. Put one plain question to whoever manages marketing: "If we asked for every login tomorrow, which accounts would we receive as owners, and which would we only get reports from?" The answer usually maps your position faster than a contract review.

Content, design and the copyright question

The written pages and the visual design are where ownership is least obvious. The U.S. Copyright Office's Circular 1 says copyright in a work initially belongs to the author who created it, and that a transfer of copyright generally must be made in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed (or the owner's authorized agent). Whether a paid invoice, an email or a line in a proposal counts as that writing is a question for your own attorney.

Many agreements lean on the phrase "work made for hire." Circular 30 explains that a work ordered or commissioned from someone who is not an employee counts as a work made for hire only if it falls within one of nine listed categories and both parties expressly agree to that status in a written instrument they sign. If any requirement is missing, it is not a work made for hire. Whether a particular website, or any part of one, fits those categories is a legal question, and the Copyright Office says it cannot give legal advice about the status of a work. Your attorney can read the actual language.

Content raises a second point that has nothing to do with law. The substance of your pages (your services, your process, your answers to the questions customers ask) came from your business. A writer should not have to invent what your team already knows, and a business should not end up paying rent on the words that describe its own work.

A fictional example: two businesses, two halves

Here are two fictional businesses. A dental practice in Arizona has paid a monthly fee for its site, hosting and blog posts for six years. When it decides to change vendors, it finds that the domain is in the practice's own name, because the office manager registered it long ago. The site, the theme and seventy blog posts, though, live in the vendor's platform, and the contract describes them as licensed for use during the term. The practice keeps its address and starts over on everything else.

A fictional estate planning firm in Tennessee has the opposite problem. Its designer handed over the site files and a signed assignment of the copy, but registered the domain in the designer's own registrar account. The firm owns every page and still cannot point its own address at them without the designer's cooperation. Each business owned half of its website, and neither knew which half until it tried to leave.

How Hudson South handles ownership

On a Hudson South build, the client owns everything. The domain is registered in the client's name, and so is the hosting account, whether that is Netlify, the WordPress host or Squarespace. The client owns the site's files (the code and theme files on Netlify and WordPress, or, on Squarespace, the account and everything published on it), all copy, the page library and the structured data, along with the Hudson Twenty-One profile and the research. Analytics and Search Console accounts sit in the client's name as well. Two honest edges come with that promise. Stock photos, premium fonts and paid plugins belong to their vendors, so they are licensed in the client's name and carry over. In regulated industries, the licensed professional still approves content, even at the Hands-Off level.

Hudson South offers four levels: Foundation, Authority, Ongoing and Hands-Off. Foundation covers the site, migration with redirects, structured data and forms, all owned by the client. The work runs in the same four steps as Hudson South's content work. First comes Authority Asset, which gathers the business's approved knowledge and evidence. Hudson Twenty-One follows, recording how the business communicates across 21 dimensions so the pages sound like it. Market Intelligence then researches the buyer questions and the market, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first content. Platforms and process are covered in the website builds overview. For setting up each account correctly, see who should hold your domain and website accounts, and before signing anything new, read what to check in a website contract.

Find out what you actually hold

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Sources

1. Registrants' Benefits and Responsibilities. ICANN. Read 2026-10-17.
2. Managing owners, users, and permissions. Search Console Help. Read 2026-10-17.
3. Add, edit, and delete Analytics users and user groups. Analytics Help. Read 2026-10-17.
4. Copyright Basics (Circular 1). U.S. Copyright Office. Read 2026-10-17.
5. Works Made for Hire (Circular 30). U.S. Copyright Office. Read 2026-10-17.