Who Owns Your Website? Why the Answer Matters More Than You Think

Who Owns Your Website? Why the Answer Matters More Than You Think

If you've ever thought about switching web agencies or moving your site to a new hosting provider, you may have come across an unexpected obstacle: being charged a fee to receive a copy of your own website.

It happens more often than it should. And it's worth understanding why and what a different approach looks like.

Your website is built on WordPress. That matters.

WordPress powers around 40% of all websites on the internet. It's free, open-source and not owned by any agency. When a web company builds your site on WordPress, they're using a platform that belongs to the global community. The themes, the page builder, the plugins, the vast majority are off-the-shelf tools that any developer can access.

That doesn't mean there's no skill involved in building a good WordPress site. There absolutely is. But it does raise a reasonable question: if your site is built on freely available software, what exactly are you paying for when an agency charges you to hand it over?

The technical reality of a migration

Migrating a WordPress site is a well-established process. With a plugin like Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration, a full copy of a site: files, database, content, settings can be packaged up in a relatively short space of time. It's not a specialist operation and the tools to do it are freely available.

That said, there are legitimate costs involved in some situations, particularly where a developer has spent time on a custom build, or where the migration involves unusual technical complexity. But a flat fee simply to provide a copy of a site rarely reflects the actual effort involved.

When a migration fee is reasonable

In the interest of being straightforward: we do charge for migrations when a client moves their site to us. It's worth explaining why, because we think it's a fair distinction.

Moving a website isn't just copying files from one place to another. Before we touch anything, we need to understand what we're working with: the hosting environment, the plugins in use, any custom code, how the domain and DNS are configured, whether there are email accounts tied to the hosting and whether there are any underlying issues with the site itself. What looks simple on the surface can occasionally hide complications and it's our job to find those before they become your problem.

On top of that, setting up a new hosting environment properly takes time. We configure the server, set up SSL, setup the domain name and DNS in CloudFlare, test the site thoroughly once it's moved, check that nothing has broken in the process and make sure emails, forms and any other functionality are all working as expected before we hand anything over.

So yes, there's a fee but it's for the work involved in doing a migration properly, not simply for handing over files that were already yours. That's a meaningful difference.

Real situations we've helped with

Over the years we've encountered quite a few different scenarios when helping clients get control of their own websites. Three stand out.

Conservation Chemicals came to us when they wanted to move hosting providers. Their site was a reasonably complex WordPress build, we were able to migrate everything cleanly and the process was straightforward from a technical standpoint. Read more about the Conservation Chemicals project here.

Parkin Finance, a Cumbria-based accounting firm, had a different experience. When they came to us, their previous web developers declined to hand over a copy of the site at all  citing "proprietary software." In practice, what this amounted to was a blog feed pulling in accountancy-related posts; nothing that would be considered genuinely bespoke. Rather than spend time arguing the point, we simply rebuilt the site from scratch. Parkin Finance now has a site they fully own, with no strings attached.

Greaves Farm Caravan Park, a lovely family-run park near Cartmel, came to us in a trickier situation: their previous developer had disappeared. There was no one to contact, no access to hand over and no straightforward route to the existing site. We built them a new website on a fresh domain, then worked with them to recover their original .co.uk domain from their registrar at IONOS. Once we had it, we pointed it to the new site and updated their social media profiles accordingly. It was a more involved process but not an uncommon one and the park now has full control of everything. If you find yourself in a similar situation, our Website Recovery service is built for exactly this.

Questions worth asking before you sign with any agency

These situations are avoidable with the right groundwork. Before starting a relationship with any web company, it's worth getting clear answers on a few things:

• Who will the domain be registered to? (It should always be you.)
• Will you have independent access to your hosting account?
• Is there a fee to receive a copy of the site if you decide to leave?
• What happens to your content, your SEO, your form data?

These aren't difficult questions. A straightforward agency will answer them without hesitation.

Our approach

We build every Freshspace site on the understanding that it belongs to the client, not to us. If you ever decided to move on for any reason we'd help make that transition as smooth as possible, without charging you for the privilege.

That's partly a practical decision: the web industry is small and reputation matters. But it's also just the right way to work. You've invested in your website. You should own it.

And if you've already lost access to your site, take a look at our Website Recovery service, it happens more than you'd think and it's something we can usually help with.