The Three Things a Website Is Made Of
To know what you own, you have to know what the parts are. Every website is three things.
- The domain name. yourbusiness.com. You rent this from a registrar for about fifteen dollars a year, and as long as you keep paying, it’s yours to point anywhere.
- The files. The actual pages, code, and images that make up the site. This is the website.
- The hosting. The computer those files sit on so the world can see them.
Ownership means you can take the files and put them on any hosting you want. Renting means you can’t.
What the Builders Actually Give You
Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy Website Builder, Weebly. They all work the same way. Your site only exists inside their system. There are no files to download. The page you built is a set of instructions their software reads, and only their software can read it.
Go look. Try to export your Wix site. You’ll get your blog posts and maybe your product list. Not the site. Squarespace exports some content as a WordPress file, and the design doesn’t come with it. Shopify gives you a spreadsheet of products. In every case, what you get back is a pile of text and pictures. Not a working website.
That’s the fine print nobody reads. Your words and your photos are yours. The website isn’t.
When That Bites You
It never matters until the day it does. The price goes up. The platform kills a feature you depend on. Your account gets flagged by an automated system and locked, and support is a chatbot. You want to move to somebody who can do more than the builder allows. Or you just get a bill dispute and they turn the site off.
On that day you find out you’re starting over from zero. Every page rebuilt. Every form rewired. And while you rebuild, the old site is either gone or still up, out of your control, with your name on it.
I’ve watched a business lose a decade-old site over a billing hiccup on a card that expired. The platform had no obligation to wait, so it didn’t.
WordPress Is Better, With a Catch
WordPress is different in one important way. The files are real and you can download them. If you host WordPress yourself, you own the site. That’s a real advantage over the builders.
The catch is that most WordPress sites are built on a paid theme and a page builder plugin. Move the site and the theme license, the builder, and a dozen plugins come along as ongoing subscriptions. Stop paying for the builder, and your pages turn to soup. You own the house, but somebody else owns the framing.
How to Check What You Own, in Five Minutes
- Who is the domain registered to? Log in to wherever the domain lives. If you can’t, or the developer registered it in their own name, fix that first. Nothing else matters if you don’t control the name.
- Can you download the whole site as files? If the answer is “sort of” or “the content but not the design,” you’re renting.
- Could a different developer take those files and put them on different hosting? If yes, you own it. If it only works inside one company’s system, you don’t.
- What breaks if you stop paying one specific subscription? If the answer is “the whole site,” that subscription owns you.
What Owning It Looks Like
Plain HTML, CSS, and images. The oldest, most boring technology on the web, and the only kind every host on earth can serve. There is nothing to subscribe to and nothing that expires. You get a folder. Put it on any server, hand it to any developer, keep a copy on a thumb drive in a desk drawer. That’s a website you own.
That’s how I build every site, and I hand over the folder at the end. You’re welcome to keep hosting with me because it’s easy and I answer the phone. You’re just as welcome to walk. Nothing I build can hold you hostage, and that’s on purpose.