"My website" sounds like one thing you either own or do not. It is actually four separate things, held in four different ways, and it is common for a business to hold two of them and assume it holds all four.
This is not usually anybody behaving badly. It is what happens when arrangements are made informally, years pass, and nobody has cause to write down who has what. The awkward moment arrives later, when you want to move, redesign, or simply get a copy of something.
Here are the four, and the question to ask about each.
1. The domain name
The address people type. This is the one that matters most, because it is the one that cannot be reconstructed — you can rebuild a website, but there is only one of your domain name.
Domains have a registrant, which is the legal holder, and various administrative contacts, which are not the same thing. It is common for a domain to be registered by whoever built the first website, in their own name or their company's, purely because they were the one at a keyboard that day.
Ask: who is named as registrant, and do I have login access to the account it sits in? If the answer is somebody else, ask them to transfer it. It is a routine process and a reasonable request.
2. The hosting
The service that serves the website to visitors, and often the service handling your email as well. Hosting is a rented service, so "owning" it means holding the account rather than owning anything.
The arrangement to be aware of is resold hosting, where your website sits inside somebody else's larger account. That can be a perfectly good arrangement — it is often cheaper and better supported than running your own. What it means practically is that you cannot get at the underlying account, so moving away depends on their cooperation.
Ask: is there an account in my business's name that I could log in to, and if not, what does moving away involve?
Domain and hosting are the two that determine whether you can move. If you hold both, everything else is negotiable, because at worst you can rebuild elsewhere. If you hold neither, you are dependent on goodwill.
3. The content
The words, the photographs, the logo. Copyright sits with whoever created the work unless it has been assigned in writing, and there are more parties involved here than people expect.
- Copy written by an agency or freelancer belongs to them until it is assigned to you. Most contracts do assign it on payment — but it is worth checking that yours says so rather than assuming.
- Photographs belong to the photographer. A commissioned shoot is usually licensed for particular uses, and "the website" may not automatically include your social media, a brochure or a van wrap. This catches people out regularly.
- Stock images are licensed to the party that bought the licence. If your designer bought them under their own account, the licence may not transfer with the website.
- Your logo should be assigned to you in writing, and you should hold the original vector files, not only the PNG that was put on the website.
Ask: do I have the original files, and do I have something in writing saying I can use them for anything I want?
4. The build itself
The design and the code. This is the one most often assumed and least often written down, and it is worth understanding that a licence is the normal arrangement rather than a warning sign.
If your website is on a platform like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix or a WordPress theme, you are licensing that platform or theme. That is what everybody using them is doing. It is not a lesser arrangement; it is the arrangement, and it is why the monthly cost is what it is.
Where a developer has built something custom, there are two possibilities and they are both legitimate. Either the work is assigned to you outright, or it is licensed to you — typically a perpetual licence to use it, with the underlying code and any reusable framework staying with the developer. I license my own custom software builds rather than assigning them, and I say so plainly in the contract, because a lot of what makes a build good is a framework refined across many projects and I am not selling that off one job at a time. Assignment is possible, and it is priced separately, which is the honest way round.
Ask: is this assigned or licensed, and either way, can I take the files and have someone else work on them?
The problem is almost never that something is licensed rather than owned. The problem is finding out which it is at the moment you need to act on it. Any reputable supplier will answer this question in one sentence.
The practical test
Forget the paperwork for a moment and ask one question: if I fell out with everyone currently involved in my website tomorrow, what would I still have?
If the answer is the domain, access to the hosting, a copy of the content and permission to use it, you are in a good position regardless of what the contracts say about the code. If the answer is a phone number for someone who has all of it, that is worth changing, and the time to change it is while everybody is on good terms.
How to sort it without making it awkward
This does not have to be a confrontation, and framing it as one tends to make it harder than it needs to be. Something like: "I am tidying up our business records — can you confirm what is in my name and send over copies of the files?" is a normal request that a good supplier will deal with the same week.
Then write down what you find. One page, kept with your other business records: registrar and login, host and login, where the files are, who created what, and what the contract says. Review it when anything changes. That page is worth more than any of the individual answers, because the thing that actually goes wrong is not a bad arrangement — it is a perfectly reasonable arrangement that nobody remembers.
If you want the wider list of what a website has to get right, that is in what a small business website actually needs. And the licensing position on bespoke builds is set out on the Custom Software page rather than left to a conversation.