If you’re not in complete control of your website, it’s time to look at the services you’re using or the partners you’re working with.

To start, you should be able to answer “yes” to all of these basic questions:

• Do you have full control over your website including admin level access?
• Do you have access to all of your plugins and tools?
• Can you add, delete and modify plugins? 
• Does your website development agency have more access and control over your site than you do?
• Can you update your site, add content and modify posts as you see fit?
• Do you have full ownership of your domain name?
• Do you have complete control of your hosting service and package?

If you answered no to any of these questions, you may not have full control over your website.

The Importance of Being the Admin of Your Site

Far too often, businesses leave control of their website in the hands of their outside developers or agencies. This opens you up to a host of risks with the potential to lose control of your site resulting in hours, days or weeks of work to reclaim ownership. 

To start, you should be listed as the site administrator and have access to all of your plugins and tools, so you can make changes at any time. You should also be able to update your site as often as you want without an outside party having to manage it for you.

While you may require the technical expertise of your outside dev team when it comes to certain maintenance, update and security issues, you should still retain complete control over the primary ownership of the site so that you can decide who has access to the back end.

Your domain name should also be under your ownership, and you should manage the hosting service that hosts your site. 

You should also have complete control over who manages comments left on your site and how those comments are managed. 

If there are people outside of your organization who are listed as admins of your site, do you have the ability to manage those admins and do they really need full admin roles or perhaps only limited access roles for certain features?

The Risk in Not Owning Your Site

If you don’t have full control over your site, it can be a liability for your business. If there are people outside of your organization who are admins of your site, those people could make unauthorized changes that damage your brand or cause issues with SEO. Of course, it is also possible that your external partner simply closes their doors and leaves you in limbo over site ownership.

Additionally, if someone else has access to all of the plugins on your site and can make changes without consulting you first, they could also cause problems by removing or enabling features without warning.

You also need to make sure that you have complete ownership of your domain name and hosting service. If someone else has control over either of these things, this could lead to issues like having to pay extra fees for hosting or losing access entirely if the domain name is taken away from you due to nonpayment or other reasons.

Your agency or development partner should be more than willing to provide you with full access to your website and all plugins. They should also have no issue with the actual site owner, your company, being listed as the primary admin or superuser with full access.

Takeaway

Your website is the public-facing image for your brand. Regardless of who builds or manages your site, maintaining control and ownership of your site ensures that the messaging and content presented on your site reflects the vision and image you want to convey.

Make sure that you can answer ‘yes’ to all the ownership questions above and you’ll rest comfortably knowing that you alone have proprietary control over your website.