Strategy
Do You Actually Own Your Domain? A Five-Minute Check
By the LA Web Design team6 min read
Your domain name is the one piece of your online presence everything else depends on: your website, your email, the link on your Google Business Profile, every business card you've printed. And a surprising number of small businesses don't control theirs. It was registered years ago by a web designer, an ex-employee, a relative who “handles the tech,” or a marketing company that bundled it into a monthly plan.
Usually nothing goes wrong until you try to switch providers. Then the domain becomes a bargaining chip, or the person holding it can't be reached.
Check who it's registered to
Look your domain up at lookup.icann.org. Most registrations hide the owner's name behind privacy protection now, so the public result may not say much, but it does show the registrar (the company the domain is registered through) and the expiration date. Then find the login for that registrar. If you can't get in, or nobody in the business knows which account the domain lives in, that's the first thing to solve.
Once you're in, check three things. The registrant, meaning the legal owner, should be your business or you personally. The account email should be an address you control and will still control in five years. And auto-renew should be on, with a payment card that isn't about to expire.
The expiration problem
Domains that lapse don't disappear immediately. There's usually a grace period, then a redemption period when the original owner can still recover the domain, often for a much steeper fee. After that it's released, and domains with existing traffic and links tend to get picked up quickly by people who resell them. A website and email address that took years to build can go dark because a renewal notice went to an inbox nobody checks.
If someone else holds it
Ask for the domain to be transferred to an account in your name. A reputable designer or agency will do this without fuss. It's a standard process using an authorization code, and it takes a few days. If they refuse or stall, check your original agreement, keep any invoices showing the domain was registered for your business, and know that registrars have dispute processes for exactly this situation.
Put your email on your own domain while you're there
If your business email still ends in @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, this is a good moment to fix that too. An address at your own domain looks established, survives a change of email provider, and stays with the business when an employee leaves. It needs a few DNS records, called SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, that prove your mail really comes from you. Gmail and Yahoo started enforcing these for bulk senders in 2024, and mail without them is more likely to end up in spam.
What to expect from whoever builds your website
Whatever we build, the client owns it: code, content, hosting, and the domain it all sits on. Whoever builds yours, ask for the same in writing before the project starts. It belongs on the same list as the other questions to settle before a redesign.