Do you actually own your website?
Most business owners assume that paying for a website means owning it. Often it does. Sometimes it very much does not, and the moment you find out is usually the moment you try to leave, which is the worst possible time to discover it.
There are four separate things here and they can each be held by a different party. You can own three and be stuck because of the fourth.
1. The domain
The most important one and the most commonly lost. If your developer registered the domain on their own account, they control your address, your email and anything that points at it. Not usually malice, just convenience at setup that nobody revisited.
How to check: search ICANN Lookup for your domain and read the registrant. If it is not your company or you, ask for a transfer. Any reasonable developer will do it the same day.
2. The hosting
Where the site actually runs. If it sits inside an agency's account bundled with thirty other clients, you cannot move without them, and you cannot see the bill. Ask whether the account is in your name and whether you can log in.
3. The code and the content
Ask a direct question: if we stopped working together tomorrow, what would I be able to take with me, and could another developer pick it up? A good answer names things: a repository, a CMS export, the design files. A vague answer is itself the answer.
Watch for platforms that are cheap to enter and impossible to leave. Some website builders and 'website as a service' arrangements produce nothing portable at all: stop paying and the site is gone, because you were renting it.
4. The analytics and the search profile
Google Analytics, Search Console and your Google Business Profile hold your history. If they live on an agency's account, changing supplier means starting your data from zero. These are free to own and take minutes to move.
You are not being difficult by asking. You are asking who holds the keys to something you paid for.
If the answers are bad
Ask politely and in writing for the domain transfer and admin access to hosting and analytics. Most of the time this is granted without argument, because most of the time it was carelessness rather than a strategy.
If it is refused, you have learned something important, and you should plan to rebuild on your own accounts rather than argue. Set up the domain and hosting in your own name first, then commission the work.
How we handle it, for what it is worth:
Everything we build is yours on final payment: the domain in your name, the code handed over, the accounts in your control, with a documented handover. Any developer can pick it up after us. Most clients stay anyway, which is rather the point of only keeping people who want to be kept.
