Who owns my website after a redesign?

Check these three today

1. 01

   The account login

   Log in to your site’s platform or hosting account with your own email address and password. If you can’t, or the login email belongs to your web designer, the account isn’t in your hands yet.

2. 02

   The domain registrant

   Look up your domain on ICANN Lookup to see which registrar holds it, then log in to that registrar and check that the registrant is your company. Some registration data isn’t public in the lookup, so the registrar account is where you confirm it.

3. 03

   The words and photos

   Keep your own copies of every photo and the text on your site, and know who took each photo. Having a copy and owning the copyright aren’t the same thing: copyright belongs to the author, or to the author’s heirs or assignees.

The account: who each platform treats as the owner

Wix identifies an account’s owner by the email address in its records, and the owner of a site is the owner of the Wix account it was created in. Once someone buys a Premium plan, Wix typically ties ownership to the billing details of whoever paid, and if you invite collaborators, the account owner keeps full control and access.

If a designer built your Wix site in their own account, they can move it to yours with Transfer site under Site Actions on the dashboard, along with the domain and any business email bought through Wix. You accept it from an invite email, which expires in 3 days.

Each Squarespace site has one owner, and only that owner can transfer ownership, to a contributor who has already accepted an invite. The transfer also moves subscriptions attached to the site, such as Squarespace domains and Google Workspace.

Squarespace’s terms give a dispute between “a web designer and a client” as an example of an ownership dispute, which Squarespace tries to stay out of but reserves the right to decide. To decide one, it may ask for documents such as a government-issued photo ID, a credit card invoice or a business license.

WordPress is free software licensed under the GPL, and WordPress.org doesn’t host your site: its hosting page says it doesn’t “host every WordPress blog in the world.” Installing it yourself, as the download page puts it, is for anyone comfortable “getting their own hosting and domain”.

So on WordPress, the account that matters is your hosting account, plus an Administrator login to the site itself, the role with access to all the administration features of a single site.

A Duda site may sit in a web company’s account, with you logging in as a client. Duda support doesn’t transfer sites, so a client who needs ownership has to ask the account owner, who sends a transfer link that expires after 24 hours; after the transfer the site stays unpublished until the new owner picks a subscription.

The domain: who the registrant is

ICANN, which coordinates domain names, defines the registrant as the person or company that registers a domain and signs a contract with a registrar. Under its transfer policy, the registered name holder is the only party with the authority to approve or deny moving the domain to another registrar.

Wix may treat the registrant listed in databases like ICANN’s as the domain’s owner, and may side with the registrant when billing details conflict. Its advice is to buy the domain yourself and to cut off a past designer’s access, since anyone left in your account could cancel or transfer the domain.

Your registrant details also have to stay accurate: ICANN lists providing accurate information and updating it promptly among a registrant’s responsibilities. After a change of registrant, the transfer policy has the registrar lock the domain against moving to another registrar for 60 days, unless it let you opt out before the change.

Your business email rides on the domain too. An address at your own domain stays yours through a redesign or a change of email provider, as long as the domain is in your name.

The words and photos

The hosted platforms leave your content with you. Wix says the content you build on Wix belongs to you, Squarespace’s terms say your user content stays yours, and Duda’s terms say it doesn’t claim ownership of your content, though Squarespace and Duda keep a license to use it to run and promote their services.

The harder question is who made the content. Ordinarily the person who creates a work is its author and first owner, and the Copyright Office’s Circular 30 explains the exception, a work made for hire: work an employee does as part of the job, or a commissioned work in one of nine categories with a written agreement, signed by both sides, that calls it one.

So if a photographer or a web company made your photos or wrote your pages, check what your agreement says about copyright, and ask for the original files.

Keep your own copies, because moving content between platforms has limits. Squarespace’s export covers only some page types and writes a WordPress-format file, Duda’s site export is on the Agency plan and higher, and a Wix site has to run on Wix’s servers.

On WordPress, Tools > Export saves your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags and users to an XML file you can keep.

Settle these before a redesign starts

1. Whose account the site lives in. Make it yours, with the designer invited in: Wix lets you assign roles to people working on your site without sharing your own login.
2. Who pays the platform. Wix typically ties a Premium site’s ownership to the billing details, so pay with your company’s card.
3. Who registers the domain, and in whose name.
4. Who owns the photos and the text, in writing, and when you get the original files.
5. How the designer’s access ends when the job ends.

How Katsa handles ownership

Katsa builds inside your own account, so the site stays yours. We work from the photos and facts already on your site, or ones you send us, and nothing goes live before you’ve seen it on your own site.

The Wix, Squarespace, WordPress and Duda pages show how to give us access on each platform and how to remove it once the page is live.