Who actually owns your website.

Most small business owners believe they own their website. Many of them own none of it, and they find out on the worst possible day: when the person who built it stops answering the phone.

This happens constantly. It happened to a client of ours before they were a client of ours. It is not usually malice. Somebody takes a web design side business as far as it goes, gets a full-time job, stops opening the invoices from the hosting company, and six months later a site that was earning somebody's living is gone. The domain lapses. The email that ran on it stops. And because everything was in their name, there is nobody to escalate to.

This guide is how to check what you own, in about twenty minutes, before you need to know.

The four things, and who usually holds them

A website is not one asset. It is four, and they can sit with four different parties.

The domain is the one that ends businesses. Everything else can be rebuilt in a few weeks. A domain somebody else owns, with your customers' email addresses attached to it, can be held indefinitely, and in a dispute your options are slow and expensive.

Check the domain first

Go to a WHOIS lookup, type your domain, and read the registrant. For a .ca domain, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority runs its own lookup at cira.ca.

You are looking for three fields. The registrant should be your business name, not your web designer's, and not a privacy service that was set up by somebody else. The administrative contact email should be an address you can actually open today. And the expiry date should be far enough away that you are not one missed renewal from an outage.

The second thing to check is where your email actually lives. If your business email is on your domain, the domain's DNS records are what point it at your mail provider. The same person holding the domain is holding your email, which is why a domain dispute escalates from annoying to existential in about a day.

Then the accounts

Open each of these and check who has owner-level access, not just admin.

• Google Business Profile. This holds your reviews, and reviews are the single most valuable marketing asset most local businesses have. It should be owned by your own Google account, with anyone else added as a manager.
• Google Analytics. Owned by you, agency added as a user. If the property lives inside an agency account, your entire traffic history leaves with them.
• Google Ads. The account should be yours, linked to the agency's manager account. This one is worth insisting on, because the campaign history and conversion data have real value and get wiped by a rebuild.
• The hosting account. Ideally in your name and paid on your card. If it is not, at minimum know who the provider is.
• Any password manager vault your builder keeps your credentials in.

The pattern is the same throughout: you are the owner, the people helping you are added to what you own. That single arrangement prevents almost every version of this problem, and it costs nothing to set up at the start.

Who owns the code

This is the fuzziest one and the one most contracts are silent about.

If an agency built you a custom site, the default in Canadian copyright law is that the person who created the work owns it unless the contract says otherwise. An employee's work belongs to their employer. A contractor's work, by default, belongs to the contractor. So unless your agreement transfers it, the agency may own the code to your site even though you paid for it.

In practice this matters less than it sounds for a template site, where there was never much to own, and quite a lot for a custom build you want to take elsewhere. What you want in the contract is a sentence assigning the rights in the deliverables to you on final payment. Most agencies will agree to it without argument. The ones who will not have told you something useful.

Photography is its own question. If your site uses stock images, the licence is usually tied to whoever bought it, and it does not always travel with the site. Original photography of your own work, taken by you, is both better for search and free of this problem entirely.

What a healthy setup looks like

Everything in your name. Agency added as a manager or user everywhere, owner nowhere. Domain renewal on auto-renew with a card that does not expire before it does. Business email on a provider you control, not bundled into the hosting account. A copy of the site's files or repository that you could hand to somebody else tomorrow. Contract language assigning the work to you.

That is the whole checklist. None of it is technical and none of it requires you to understand how any of it works.

What to do if it has already gone wrong

If the person who built your site has stopped responding and you cannot get into anything, start with the domain, because it is both the most important and the one with a formal process behind it.

Registrars have dispute procedures, and for .ca domains CIRA has its own. You will need proof the business is yours: incorporation documents, invoices showing you paid for the domain, anything tying the name to you. Gather that before you make the call, because the first question will be how you can prove it.

If the domain itself is lost, the practical fallback is unpleasant but survivable: register the nearest available variant, redirect what you can, tell your customers directly, and update every listing you have. We have helped businesses through this. It costs months of search visibility and a real amount of goodwill, and it is entirely avoidable by spending twenty minutes on the checks above.

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If you are not sure what you own and would rather somebody looked with you, send us the domain and we will check the public records and tell you what we find. There is no charge for that, and no obligation attached to it. We would rather you knew.