Hiring
Buying a website: the questions that decide what you actually own
Buying a website is buying an asset, and the terms decide whether it is yours. Before paying, establish who registers the domain, who owns the code and content on final payment, whose hosting account it lives in, what post-launch support costs, and exactly what leaving involves.
What are you actually buying?
Not a design. You are buying a set of assets — a domain registration, a codebase, content, and the accounts that host and measure it — plus the right to keep using them. Every dispute that follows a website project traces back to one of those five things not being clearly assigned.
The design is the visible part and the least contested. Nobody argues about the shade of blue two years later. They argue about who can move the site.
Who should own the domain?
You, registered in your business name, in a registrar account you can log into without asking anyone. This is not negotiable and it costs nothing to arrange at the start.
A domain in a developer’s account is the most common single point of failure in a small business web presence. Everything else can be rebuilt in days; a domain in someone else’s name is a negotiation, and transfers take days even when both parties are cooperating.
- Registrant name and email are yours, not a placeholder and not the agency’s
- You can log in to the registrar without a password reset request to a third party
- Auto-renew is on and the card on file is current
- Transfer lock is enabled to prevent unauthorised movement
What does "you own the website" have to say in writing?
Without a written assignment, the developer generally retains copyright in what they wrote and you hold an implied licence to use it. A licence is narrower than ownership — it may not let you give the code to another developer, move it to another platform, or resell the business including its site.
The sentence to ask for is short: all intellectual property rights in the deliverables assign to the client on receipt of final payment. Payment-conditional is fair to both sides. It costs a supplier nothing to include and its absence costs you everything at exactly the wrong moment.
What should a quote include, and what is usually missing?
| Item | Frequently excluded | What it costs to add later |
|---|---|---|
| Copywriting | Very often | Several thousand words you either write or commission |
| Photography | Almost always | A day rate, or a site full of stock imagery that reduces trust |
| Hosting after year one | Commonly free for 12 months | Frequently priced above market once you are settled |
| Revisions beyond two rounds | Usually | An hourly rate that was never quoted |
| Post-launch support | Often 30 days only | A retainer that was not mentioned during the sale |
| Accessibility testing | Nearly always | A remediation project rather than a build decision |
Read the exclusions before the inclusions. The gap between two quotes is almost always scope rather than value, and normalising both to the same scope usually reverses which one looked cheaper.
How should payment be staged?
A deposit plus milestones tied to something you can open in a browser. For a short build, 40 per cent up front and 60 per cent on completion is standard. For anything longer, three or four stages.
Full payment before work begins is not normal and gives you no leverage. Zero payment up front asks a stranger to fund your project. Neither extreme is a good sign about how the rest of the engagement will go.
What questions expose a bad arrangement fastest?
- "If I want to leave in a year, what do I take with me?" — hesitation here is the single most informative moment in the conversation.
- "Whose name is on the domain and the hosting account?"
- "Do I own the code and content outright once the final invoice is paid?"
- "What does month thirteen cost, in total, across everything?"
- "Can I see three live client sites, not screenshots?"
Run the three live sites through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab and open view-source on each. Three slow sites is a pattern; content missing from view-source means every non-rendering crawler sees an empty page. Both are measurable in ten minutes and neither can be argued with.
What about the legal pages?
A commercial site needs a privacy policy, terms, and — if it sells — a refund policy and terms of business. These are not decorative: Google Ads, Merchant Center and most payment processors require them, and their absence blocks channels you may want later.
Ask who is producing them and whether they will be tailored to what the site actually collects. A generic template describing advertising cookies you do not set is an inaccurate legal document, which is a worse position than a short honest one.
Questions people ask about this
- How much should a small business website cost?
- A straightforward brochure site with content supplied typically runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand, depending on market and scope; an e-commerce build with payments starts higher because the checkout, tax and fulfilment logic is real work. What matters more than the number is whether the quote includes content, hosting, support and ownership — a cheaper quote missing all four is not cheaper.
- Should I use a website builder instead?
- For a simple presence with no unusual requirements, often yes, and a developer who tells you so is worth listening to. The trade-offs are portability and cost at scale: builders are quick and get expensive per feature, and moving off one later means rebuilding. If you need custom checkout logic or an integration, that is when a build earns its price.
- What if I already have a site and cannot reach the developer?
- Start with the WHOIS record and your registrar account, because the domain is the recoverable asset that matters most. If it is in your name you can repoint DNS to new hosting and rebuild, which is survivable. If it is not, request the transfer in writing and, failing that, plan a new domain with a redirect map — expensive, but far cheaper now than after two more years of accumulated links.
- Do I need a contract for a small project?
- Yes, and it can be two pages. Scope, price, payment schedule, revision allowance, what you must supply and by when, ownership on final payment, and how either side ends it. Most disputes on small projects are not bad faith — they are two people who each assumed something different and never wrote it down.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.