Who owns your website

There is no measurable search volume for this question under any phrasing tested, and that absence is the problem rather than a reason to skip the page. Almost nobody asks who owns their website until the relationship with their supplier has ended, and by then the answer was settled months earlier by a document they may not have read.

What follows is general information so that you know what to ask about. It is not legal advice, and ownership questions turn on the actual wording of your agreement. If something here does not match your paperwork, that is a conversation with a lawyer, not with this page.

Ownership is set by the contract, not by custom

Paying for work does not automatically transfer copyright in it. Under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), work created by an employee in the course of employment generally belongs to the employer, while work created by an independent contractor generally belongs to the contractor unless it has been assigned. An assignment of copyright must be in writing and signed by the party giving it up.

Most web design suppliers are contractors, not employees. So the default position, absent a written assignment, is frequently the opposite of what the client assumes.

Moral rights are a separate matter again. They sit with the individual creator, are not assignable in the way copyright is, and are usually dealt with by a written consent rather than a transfer. It is a small clause that is easy to overlook.

The separate things that can each belong to someone different

A website is not one asset. It is at least seven, and they can end up in different hands:

• The domain name licence — held by whoever is recorded as the registrant
• The hosting account — held by whoever opened it and controls the login and the billing
• The design files — the source design document, not a flattened export
• The source code — templates, stylesheets, custom functionality, and the repository it lives in
• The written content — including anything a copywriter produced
• The photographs — commissioned, licensed from a library, or supplied by you
• Third-party licences — themes, plugins, page builders, fonts and stock imagery

A handover that delivers a working site while retaining any one of these can still leave you unable to move.

The domain registrant record and the WHOIS lookup that reveals it

Of all of them, the domain is the one that decides whether you can walk away. Everything else can be rebuilt with effort. A domain you do not control cannot be recreated, and losing it takes your email with it.

You can check this today. A WHOIS lookup against your domain name, run through auDA’s public .au WHOIS database or through your registrar, is the fastest way to see who actually holds the registration. The registrant name is published, although contact details are generally redacted. Read the registrant field, not the technical or administrative contact fields, and not the invoice from your supplier.

If the registrant is your business, matching your registered entity name and business registration, you are in a reasonable position. If it is your web designer, their agency, or a reseller, then you hold no licence at all, whatever the invoice says. That is fixable, and it is far easier to fix while everyone is still on good terms.

What “you own the website” usually means, and what it often does not

The sentence appears in a lot of proposals. Read it against a short list of things it may quietly exclude:

• Ownership contingent on final payment, which is reasonable, but which needs to say so plainly and to state what happens if the project is terminated part-way
• Ownership of the finished output but not the source code, the build configuration or the repository
• Ownership of the site but not the design files it was made from
• A licence to use rather than an assignment of copyright, which is a materially different thing
• Ownership of everything except the supplier’s own framework or component library, which is often the part that makes it work

None of those carve-outs is automatically unreasonable. Several are normal and defensible. The problem is when they are discovered at handover rather than agreed at the start.

The components nobody can transfer to you

Some parts of a typical site are licensed, not owned, and no contract with your designer changes that. Commercial themes and plugins are licensed to a purchaser, often with the updates tied to that purchaser’s account. Fonts carry their own end-user licence, and a web licence is usually capped by traffic or by domain. Stock photography is licensed on terms that may not be transferable to you at all.

What you should get is a clean, written list of every licensed component, whose account holds each licence, what it costs to renew, and what breaks if it is not renewed. That list is more useful at handover than a further paragraph about ownership.

What to get in writing before you pay a deposit

• Who will be recorded as the domain registrant, and in whose name the hosting account will be opened
• That copyright in the design, code and content produced for you is assigned to you on final payment, in those terms
• A consent dealing with moral rights, so that later edits are not a problem
• What is delivered at handover: source files, code repository, database export, credentials
• The list of licensed third-party components and who holds each licence
• What happens to all of the above if either party terminates the project

A ten-minute domain and WHOIS check on where you stand right now

1. Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain name and read the registrant name, not the registrar’s own name.
2. Log in to your hosting account. If you cannot, you do not control it.
3. Log in to your site as an administrator, and confirm your account is an administrator and not an editor.
4. Find the contract or proposal you signed and search it for the words assign, licence, ownership and termination.
5. Write down anything you could not do in the first four steps. That list is your exposure.

What to do next

If any of those five steps failed, raise it as a request rather than a dispute. A supplier acting in good faith will move a registrant record or grant an administrator account without argument, and the response you get is information in itself.

The related questions of what a contract should cover are set out in web design contracts in Australia, and the domain licensing rules themselves in Australian domain eligibility.

Every item on that checklist is a term to agree before work starts rather than a favour to request afterwards. Putting them into a brief that any supplier can quote against is what the project brief generator is for.