Do you own your website?

A builder that only runs there

Wix’s own help, checked 8 September 2026, says a Wix site has to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers. The words you wrote are yours. The working site still needs their servers. Leaving means rebuilding what people see, then pointing the domain at the new place.

Other builders have their own rules. Open the vendor’s export page and read what you actually get. Some of the words and images may come with you. The live site usually does not. A hosted builder, or a site you host.

Someone else kept the logins

The site can look independent. The domain or the hosting bill still sits in an agency or designer’s account. You find out when you want to change a page and you cannot.

You will sometimes see “designed by” in the footer, with a link to the agency. People can click it. If that link sits on every page, Google’s spam policy lists widely distributed footer links as a way to manipulate rankings. Ask for it to be marked so Google does not count it toward rankings, or take it off, if you did not agree to it.

I have not published a job that started as an agency holding the logins. The public example below is a Squarespace site the owner did not own.

Leaving is a rebuild

You keep the useful words and images. You write what the business is now. You build a site that runs in accounts you control. If addresses change, they get mapped and redirected.

Google says to use permanent server-side redirects and to expect rankings to fluctuate while the new URLs are crawled. I do not promise they stay put, or that they rise.

Cinema 7

Micky Sabat’s film and photography studio in Sydney. Referred people look the studio up. The previous site sat on Squarespace. Changing a page meant working around that platform.

I took it off so he could change the site without that constraint, and so he owns the domain, the code and the accounts. It is live at cinema7.com.au.

Read the case study