If leaving your web company is difficult, that difficulty was designed. Here is what owning your site actually means.
Ask a simple question of whoever built your website: if we parted company tomorrow, what would I walk away with?
The answers tell you everything.
The four things you should own
Your domain, registered in your company name, in an account you can log into. Not your agency's account with your name in a field.
Your hosting, billed to you. If the site disappears when someone else stops paying a bill, you do not own it.
The code, in a form you can hand to another developer. "We use our own platform" usually means the site cannot leave, by design.
Your data. Customers, enquiries, bookings, orders — exportable to a file you can open. If getting a list of your own customers requires asking someone, they are your customers in name only.
The tell
The tell is not malice. Most agencies are not planning to hold anyone hostage. It is that a business built on retainer has no incentive to make leaving easy, and so it never gets built.
You find out at the worst possible time: when you want to change agency, when a price rises, when someone stops answering the phone.
What we do instead
Every site we build is registered and hosted in the client's own account, on their own card. We are a user on it, not the owner. The code is theirs. The database exports to a spreadsheet from a button in their dashboard.
That means a client can leave us at any time and take everything, without a conversation.
It sounds like a bad commercial decision. It is not. It changes what we are selling: not access to your own website, but work worth paying for. If the only thing keeping a client is that leaving is painful, the work was not good enough.
Two questions worth asking today
- Whose name is on the domain registration? Check, do not assume.
- Can you export your customer list yourself, right now, without asking anyone?
If either answer is uncomfortable, that is worth fixing regardless of who fixes it.