Who owns a website? For a charity, the answer is spread across five separate accounts, and most trustees have never seen a list of them. The website your charity relies on is only yours if you control all five. This audit takes about 20 minutes and needs no technical knowledge.
It matters because websites fail through ownership more often than through technology. The volunteer who registered the domain moves abroad. The agency that hosts the site stops trading. The founder whose card pays for the subscription steps down. None of these are dramatic events, and any of them can take your site offline with no warning.
The five things to check
1. The domain name
Your domain (yourcharity.org.uk) is registered with a company called a registrar, under an account someone created years ago. Find out which registrar and whose account. Type your domain into the ICANN lookup tool, or for .uk domains the Nominet WHOIS, and it will name the registrar even when the owner's details are private.
Good looks like: the domain registered to the charity by name, in an account with a charity email address, with renewal billed to a charity payment method and auto-renew switched on. Domains have grace periods after expiry, but once those lapse, someone else can buy your name.
2. DNS
DNS is the address book that points your domain at your website and your email. It usually lives with the registrar but not always, and this is the one that catches people out: you can own the domain and still be locked out of the settings that make it work. Ask whoever manages the website where the DNS is hosted, and make sure the charity holds a login.
3. Hosting or the platform subscription
If your site runs on WordPress, it lives on a hosting account. If it runs on Squarespace, Wix, or similar, the subscription is the hosting. Either way: whose account, whose email, whose payment card? A site on a platform subscription under a volunteer's personal login is the single most common failure we see, and on Squarespace the content is deleted permanently around 30 days after the subscription lapses.
4. The CMS admin
Separate from hosting: who can log in and edit the site? Good looks like at least two current administrators, both with charity email addresses. If the only admin account belongs to someone who left in 2023, resolve that this week. If an agency built your site, you should still hold an admin account of your own; an agency that resists giving you one is telling you something.
5. Email
If your charity uses addresses at your own domain, they depend on the same DNS as the website. A domain problem is an email problem, which is why charities in this situation often cannot receive the recovery emails that would fix it. Check that at least one recovery contact on each of the accounts above points somewhere that does not depend on your domain.
Write it down: the one-page asset register
The fix for all of this is a single page in your governance folder listing, for each of the five: the provider, the account holder, the renewal date, and where the credentials are kept. Charity Commission guidance treats charity property as something trustees must safeguard, and your domain and website are property. A one-page register turns an unanswerable crisis question ("who has the login?") into a 30-second lookup.
Review it once a year, at the same trustee meeting where you review insurance. It is the same category of task.
What to do if you find a gap
If an account sits with a person who is still reachable and willing, this is a good week to transfer it: registrars and platforms all have ownership transfer processes that are straightforward while everyone cooperates. Move the account to a charity email address, put two people on it, and update the register.
If the person is not reachable, do not wait for the renewal date to find out what happens. Registrars and platforms have recovery processes for exactly this situation, but they take weeks and require evidence that the charity is the rightful owner, so start early. If the site is already offline, our guide on what to do when your charity website is down covers the recovery clocks and the order to work in.
A charity contacted us recently in the worst version of this situation: a website built and looked after pro bono by a series of generous volunteers over several years, each holding a different piece. Domain in one place, hosting in another, no register anywhere. The site was offline and the first task was not fixing it but finding it. Every hour of that work was avoidable with the one-page register above.
Ownership is the boring half of website strategy
Nobody starts a website project excited about registrar accounts. But every other decision, the design, the platform, Squarespace or WordPress, sits on top of this one. Control the five accounts and the rest is recoverable. Lose them and nothing else matters.
If you have run the audit and found gaps you are not sure how to close, book a free 20-minute call. Untangling ownership is quiet work we do on most projects before anything else starts.
