Paying for a website and owning one are different, and the gap between them is invisible until the day you want to change something or leave.
There are four separate things involved. Check them one at a time.
One: the domain
The most important and the most often lost. Your domain is your address, your email, and every link anyone has ever made to you.
How to check: look your domain up on a public whois service and read the registrant. Then try logging in to the registrar yourself. Then check whose credit card the renewal comes off and who gets the expiry emails.
If any of those point at your web company, you don't control your address. That's not necessarily malice, and plenty of developers register domains for clients out of convenience. It's still a risk sitting in someone else's account, and it becomes a serious one the day you disagree about something.
Two: the hosting
Where the files actually live. Less critical than the domain, because a site can be rebuilt, but losing access means losing whatever isn't backed up.
How to check: can you log in to a hosting account, right now, without asking anyone? If the answer is that hosting is included in a monthly fee and you have never seen an account, you're renting.
Renting is a legitimate arrangement and often the more convenient one. What matters is whether you can take the site elsewhere when you want to. Ask what happens if you cancel, and get the answer in writing.
Three: the code and the content
The design, the build, the words, and the photographs. Under copyright, the person who creates something owns it by default, which means the words and code your developer produced belong to them unless your agreement says otherwise.
How to check: read what you signed. Look for wording that assigns or transfers ownership to you on final payment. Every build here hands over the domain, hosting, and code in accounts that are yours. If nothing was signed, you have a problem worth fixing now rather than later.
Photographs are their own category. If a photographer shot your premises, ask what licence you have. If the site uses stock images, that licence usually belongs to whoever bought it and may not transfer with the site.
Four: the accounts around it
The pieces that get forgotten until they're gone.
- Google Business Profile. Check you have owner access, not manager. Owners can remove managers; the reverse isn't true.
- Google Analytics and Search Console. Frequently under an agency account, which means your entire traffic history leaves with them. Both are part of the search setup.
- Email. If it runs on your domain, whoever controls DNS controls your email.
- Social accounts. Same question: whose personal login is behind the business page?
What about Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify?
On a platform, ownership splits differently. You own your content and your domain if you registered it. You don't own the site in any portable sense, because the design and functionality only exist inside that platform. Leaving means rebuilding rather than moving.
That's a fair trade for what those platforms give you, and Squarespace vs Wix vs a custom site goes through where it starts to bind.
If you find a gap
Ask, plainly and in writing, while things are normal. Most of the time this is administrative and gets sorted in a week. Framing it as tidying up your business records is true and avoids making it a confrontation.
If a request is refused, moving to a new developer covers the recovery routes, including the registrar dispute process for a domain and Google's process for recovering a Business Profile.
And for whatever comes next: register the domain yourself, on your own card, in an account you control. It costs about $20 a year and it's the difference between owning your address and borrowing it.