Does Your Web Designer Own Your Domain?

Of all the problems I get called into, this one causes the most damage relative to how easy it is to prevent. A business has been trading for eight years. Their website ranks, their email address is on every invoice and vehicle, and their customers know their web address by heart.

Then the relationship with their web designer ends, badly, or just quietly, and they discover the domain was never theirs.

What "registrant" means and why it decides everything

Every domain has a registrant: the legal holder of that domain. It's not whoever paid the invoice, and it's not whoever built the site. It's the name and contact details recorded against the domain at registration.

If your web designer registered your domain under their own company and email address, they are the registrant. They control it. They can move it, let it lapse, or decline to release it. You may have paid for it every year for a decade and still have no claim to it that doesn't involve lawyers.

How to check, in five minutes

1. Ask directly. Email whoever manages your website: "Please confirm the registrant name and registrant email address on our domain." A straight answer means you're probably fine. Vagueness, delay or "don't worry, we handle all that" is your answer.
2. Look it up yourself. A WHOIS lookup on your domain shows registrant details, the registrar, and, importantly, the expiry date. Some information may be privacy-masked, but the registrar and expiry usually aren't.
3. Check the renewal email. Renewal notices go to the registrant's email address. If nobody at your business has ever received one, your business isn't the registrant.

The three failure modes I see

The designer disappears

Not maliciously. They change careers, emigrate, or their business closes. Nobody is left to authorise a transfer, and the domain sits in an account nobody can access until it expires.

The renewal is missed

Renewal notices go to an address that no longer exists, or to somebody who left in 2022. The domain expires. Your website and every company email address stop working the same morning. Recovery ranges from awkward to impossible, and desirable expired domains get picked up within hours.

The domain becomes leverage

The relationship sours over an invoice or a disagreement, and suddenly the thing your entire business identity is attached to is being used as a bargaining chip. This is rarer than people fear, but it happens, and it's ugly.

What to do if it isn't in your name

Ask for a transfer, politely and in writing. Most providers will simply do it, plenty registered it under their own account out of convenience rather than strategy. You'll need the authorisation code from the current registrar and access to the registrant email to confirm.

Do this while the relationship is good. Requesting a domain transfer is a routine administrative task between people who get on, and a fight between people who don't.

While you're at it, check these too

• Expiry date. Diarise it. Don't rely solely on an automated email reaching the right person.
• Who controls DNS. Domain at one provider, hosting at another and email at a third, with nobody sure who holds DNS, turns every future change into a fortnight of tickets.
• Email authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Without them your invoices are more likely to be filtered as spam, and your domain can be spoofed by scammers invoicing your customers in your name.
• Hosting access. Do you have credentials for the server your site sits on, or does only your developer?

The principle

You should be able to leave any supplier without losing anything you depend on. Your domain in your name, your hosting accessible to you, your website files and data available on request. A supplier confident in their work has no reason to hold any of it, and one who resists is telling you something.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your setup, that's what a documentation audit covers, see domain registration and DNS, or just send me your domain name and I'll tell you what's publicly visible about it.