Who owns my website when an agency builds it?

Who owns my website? The short answer is: you do. Domain, design files, content, customer data, the database — all of it is yours from day one. We run it. You own it. Here is what that actually means in practice, and why it matters when you are evaluating a managed-hosting provider.

The hostage problem nobody talks about until they need to leave

Most "we'll build and host your site" deals look identical on the way in. The pricing is clear, the deliverables are listed, the promise is reassuring. What separates the good deals from the bad ones only becomes visible the day you decide to change providers. That is when the questions start:

• Is the domain registered to your company, or to the agency?
• Is the website built on a platform you can actually take with you, or on a proprietary builder you have to rebuild from scratch?
• Do you have direct access to the hosting account, or only through your agency's dashboard?
• Can you export your customer list, your orders, your media library — in a format that imports cleanly somewhere else?
• Is there a fee to leave?

If the answer to any of those is "no" or "it depends," what you bought was not a website. It was a recurring rental on someone else's asset.

What ownership means under our agreement

We use a deliberately simple split. We handle operations — you handle ownership. Concretely:

The domain stays in your name. If you do not already own it, we register it on your behalf at a standard public registrar (not inside our account) and assign it to your business. The login is yours. We never put a client's domain inside a Sensible Online wallet.

The site runs on standard WordPress. No proprietary page builder, no locked theme. We use Kadence — an open-source, GPL-licensed theme — and standard Gutenberg blocks. Anything we build can be opened, edited and exported by any WordPress developer on the planet.

The content and data are yours. Pages, blog posts, product catalogue, customer records, orders, SEO metadata, uploaded images — every piece of it lives in your WordPress install. You have admin access. You can export it whenever you want.

The design files are yours. Logos we produce, illustrations, any custom CSS — delivered to you in source form on request, no questions asked.

What the 12-month commitment does and does not restrict

We ask for a 12-month minimum so we can cover the build cost without charging a setup fee. That is the deal. It does not mean you are locked to us forever.

During those 12 months you keep full ownership of everything above. You can write blog posts, take screenshots for your investor deck, hand the database to your accountant — none of that requires our permission, because none of it belongs to us.

After the 12 months you have two choices: continue on a rolling monthly basis (no new commitment), or move on. There is no exit fee.

How we hand the keys back

When a client decides to leave, the migration follows a fixed checklist:

1. We export a full WordPress backup (database + uploads + theme + plugins) and hand it over as a single archive.
2. We transfer the domain to your registrar of choice (or simply hand you the login if it is already in your account).
3. We send you the SSL certificate details, DNS records, and any third-party API credentials we set up on your behalf.
4. We stay on call for two weeks after the move to answer questions from whoever is taking over.

We have done this. It is not a hypothetical clause. Clients have asked, and we have moved them out cleanly. That is the part of the contract you should care most about, because it is the part most providers quietly hope you never invoke.

Why this changes the relationship

When the client owns the asset, the provider has to earn the renewal every month. That is the version of this business we want to run. We would rather you stay because the service is good than because leaving is painful.