What does owning your website actually mean?
Owning a website is not one thing you either have or haven’t got. It means having the account, in your business name, for each of the separate services that together make your site work — and being able to log into each of them without asking anyone.
If someone else holds those accounts, they are not necessarily doing anything wrong. Plenty of web designers hold them as a convenience and hand them over the moment you ask. It only becomes a problem when you want to change supplier, or when the person holding them stops replying.
Three things, and they don’t come as a set
People say “my website” and mean one thing. In practice you are dealing with three, and they are often held in different places by different people.
The domain name is the address — yourbusiness.co.uk. It is rented, yearly, from a registrar. The website is the pages themselves, sitting on a hosting account or a platform like Wix, Squarespace or WordPress. The email is a third thing again, usually Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, pointed at your domain by a setting called an MX record.
A web designer can perfectly reasonably hold all three on your behalf and hand them over the day you ask. The problem is when nobody ever wrote down who holds what, and then that person stops answering the phone.
How to find out who owns your domain
Start here, because the domain is the one that matters most. Everything else can be rebuilt; an address your customers already know cannot.
If your domain ends in .co.uk or .uk, go to Nominet’s online services and try to log in with the email address the domain was registered with. Nominet is the official registry for every .uk domain, and its system shows you every domain registered to that email address. If you can get in, you can see the registrant — the legal owner — and you can change things yourself.
If you cannot get in because you no longer have that email address, Nominet will re-establish your identity for £10 plus VAT. That is a real route and it does not involve your web company at all.
If your domain ends in .com or another international ending, there is no equivalent registry you can log into. You need the account at whichever registrar holds it, or a transfer code from whoever does.
Why a WHOIS search probably won’t answer this
Every guide to this question tells you to run a WHOIS lookup. For UK domains that advice is close to useless, and it is worth knowing why before you waste an afternoon on it.
A Nominet WHOIS search returns the registration date, the status, the nameservers, and the registrant’s agent — which is the registrar or reseller managing the domain. Your own details as the owner appear only if you opted in to publishing them, and most small businesses never did.
A WHOIS result showing your web design company is completely normal and proves nothing either way. It tells you who manages the domain, not who owns it.
Nominet is also retiring WHOIS in favour of a newer system called RDAP, so the lookup tools that guides link to are on their way out.
The four checks, in ten minutes
Ask your web company for a straight answer to each of these, in an email, so there is a record.
- Whose name is the hosting in? Ask for the login, or ask which company it is with and whether the account is in your business name. If a bill for it has never reached you, it is probably not your account.
- Can you log in and change a page? Not “can you ask someone to” — can you. If you have never had a login to your own website, that is worth fixing whether or not you plan to move.
- Where does your email actually live? If your address ends in your own domain, something is hosting those mailboxes. This is the one that catches people out, because email and website often move together without anyone realising.
- Who renews what, and when? Domains renew annually. If you have never seen a renewal notice, someone else is getting them.
What decides whether you can move it at all
Four things change the answer, and they are worth knowing before anyone quotes you.
What the site is built on
The single biggest factor. A WordPress site genuinely moves. A Wix site cannot be moved at all and has to be rebuilt. Everything else sits between the two — see the table below.
Whether the domain is a .uk or a .com
A .co.uk or .uk domain can be moved by you, through Nominet, for £10 plus VAT, whatever your web company says. A .com has no equivalent route: you need the account, or a transfer code from whoever holds it, and you are subject to ICANN’s 60-day locks.
Where your email is hosted
If your email runs on the same domain, it moves when the DNS moves. That is the part that goes wrong. A move planned around the website alone will take the email down with it.
Whether anyone is actually obstructing you
Most of the time nobody is, and four emails settle it. Where someone genuinely is, the .uk route bypasses them and Nominet’s complaints process names that exact situation. A .com dispute is slower and harder.
Can I take the website itself with me?
This is where the honest answer is often no, and where a lot of articles go quiet, because the companies writing them are selling you a platform or a rebuild.
Your content — your words, your photos, your customer data — can nearly always come out. The site, meaning the design and the way it is built, frequently cannot. It depends entirely on what it was built with.
| Built with | What can come out | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Wix | Store products and CMS collections as spreadsheets. Nothing else. | Rebuild. Wix’s own documentation says a Wix site “needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers”. |
| Squarespace | A partial export: standard pages, one blog, text and image blocks. | Mostly a rebuild. Shop pages, portfolios, custom styling and anything clever are excluded by Squarespace’s own list. |
| GoDaddy website builder | No export tool exists that GoDaddy documents. | Rebuild, and copy the text across by hand. The domain is still portable. |
| Shopify | Products, customers, orders and discounts as spreadsheets. Themes separately. | Data moves; tax, shipping, checkout and payment settings have to be set up again from scratch. |
| WordPress | The most of any of them — posts, pages, users, menus — plus files and database if you have server access. | A genuine move rather than a rebuild, provided you can get at the hosting. |
None of this means you are trapped. It means that if your site is on Wix or a GoDaddy builder, “moving it” and “rebuilding it” are the same job, and anyone quoting you for a straightforward migration has not looked. Moving a website into your own control is a fixed-price job here, and if it turns out to be a rebuild rather than a move, you get told that before you spend anything.
What if my web company won’t help?
For a .uk domain, you largely do not need them to. You can change the registrar yourself from inside your Nominet account by entering the new company’s tag, and it usually goes through within about ten minutes. Where the new registrar has to accept the handover, they have up to five days before the request lapses and is refunded.
If someone is genuinely obstructing you, Nominet’s complaints process names this exact situation — “registrars not transferring domain names when requested” — as a valid complaint, along with registrars registering domains in their own name without permission. You go to the registrar first, then to Nominet customer services, then escalate. They aim to acknowledge within two working days.
One thing that is not the right tool: Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service. That exists for abusive registrations where you have trade mark rights, it costs £200 for a summary decision or £750 for an expert one, and it is not designed for a contract row with your web designer. For that, Citizens Advice or Trading Standards is the more sensible route.
For a .com, the registrar must give you the transfer code within five calendar days of you asking. Be aware of two locks that catch people out: you cannot transfer within 60 days of a previous transfer, and a change of owner can also trigger a 60-day lock.
The mistake that takes a website down
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the one that turns a tidy admin job into a bad week.
When you move a .uk domain away, the old provider stops providing DNS for it. 123 Reg, for example, documents that it removes DNS and forwarding 48 hours after the tag changes, and the domain vanishes from your control panel straight away. DNS is what points your address at your website and your email. If the new provider has not set it up before that window closes, your site and your email both go dark.
Set up the new hosting and DNS first, with your email records copied across. Lower the time-to-live settings a day ahead. Then move the domain. Done that way it is invisible to customers; done the other way round it is a day of bounced enquiries.
What it costs
The checking is free. After that it depends entirely on which route you need.
| Route | Cost | When you need it |
|---|---|---|
| Checking who owns what | Free | Always. Start here before paying anyone for anything. |
| Change registrar via your new registrar | Usually free | The normal route. 123 Reg charges nothing to change a tag; .co.uk transfers in free, .com £19.99. |
| Change registrar yourself via Nominet | £10 + VAT | .uk domains only. When your web company won’t help. One fee even for several domains. |
| Re-establish your Nominet identity | £10 + VAT | When you no longer have the email address the domain was registered with. |
| Someone does the whole move | £100–£500 reported | Hosting migration, UK agencies’ own published ranges. Higher if the platform can’t export. |
| Nominet dispute service | £200–£750 | Rarely. Trade mark disputes only — not a contract row with your designer. |
Paying someone to do the whole move properly is a different question from the fee itself. UK agencies publishing their own figures put a hosting migration at roughly £100 to £500, and a full platform move — Wix to WordPress, say — considerably higher, because that is a rebuild wearing a different name. Those are sellers’ own published ranges rather than independent survey data; there isn’t any independent survey data on this, which is worth knowing when you compare quotes.
Can I do this myself?
The checking, yes, and you should — it costs nothing and takes a morning. Logging into Nominet, asking for four logins in writing, and finding out what your site is built on are all things you can do today without help.
The moving is where it splits. A .uk registrar change through Nominet is genuinely a ten-minute job. Repointing the DNS, carrying the email across without losing a day of enquiries, and rebuilding on a new platform if the old one cannot be exported are not, and that is where people get into trouble — usually by moving the domain first and finding out about the 48-hour rule afterwards.
The honest split: check it yourself, and get help for the move if email is involved or the site is on a platform that cannot be exported.
What to do this week
Try to log into Nominet with the email your domain was registered with, and write down what you find. Ask your web company, in an email so there is a record, for four things: the domain login, the hosting login, the website login, and confirmation of where your email is hosted. Check which of the five platforms above your site is built on, so you know whether you are talking about a move or a rebuild. And put the domain renewal date in your calendar.
If all four logins arrive and they are in your name, you own your website and there is nothing to fix. That is the most common outcome, and it is a good morning’s work to have confirmed it.
Frequently asked questions
- Does a WHOIS search tell me who owns my domain?
- Usually not, for a UK domain. A Nominet WHOIS returns the registration date, the status, the nameservers and the registrant’s agent — the registrar or reseller managing it. Your own details appear only if you opted in to publishing them, and most small businesses never did. A WHOIS result showing your web design company is normal and proves nothing either way.
- Can I move my domain if my web company won’t help?
- For a .co.uk or .uk domain, generally yes. You can log into Nominet’s online services with the email the domain was registered with and change the registrar yourself for £10 plus VAT. If you no longer have that email address, Nominet will re-establish your identity for the same fee.
- Will my website and email go down if I move the domain?
- They can, and this is the mistake that causes real damage. Your old provider stops providing DNS when the domain leaves — 123 Reg documents removing DNS and forwarding 48 hours after the tag changes. Set up the new hosting and DNS first, with your email records copied across, lower the time-to-live settings a day ahead, then move the domain.
- Can I take my Wix or Squarespace site with me?
- Not the site itself. Wix’s own documentation says a Wix site needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers, so moving means rebuilding. Squarespace exports standard pages and one blog but excludes shop pages, portfolios, custom styling and more. WordPress is the one that genuinely moves, provided you can get at the hosting.
- Can I update my own website once I have it back?
- That depends what it is built on, and it is worth asking before you move. WordPress and Shopify both have editors you can use yourself. A hand-built site may need whoever built it. If being able to change your own opening hours or prices matters to you, say so before the move, not after.
- What does it cost to have someone move a website?
- UK agencies publishing their own figures put a hosting migration at roughly £100 to £500, and a full platform move considerably higher because that is a rebuild in all but name. Those are sellers’ own published ranges; there is no independent survey data on this.