Who owns your plumbing website? A 5-minute check.

Most plumbers find out who really owns their website on the worst possible day: the web guy stops answering, the agency raises the price, or the site goes down and nobody can log in to fix it. It's your company name on the truck. It should be your name on the domain.

These five checks take about five minutes. Do them on a quiet evening, not during an outage.

1. Who owns the domain?

Your domain (yourcompany.com) is the address everything else hangs on: your website, often your email, and the link on your Google listing. Whoever controls it controls all of those.

• Can you log in to the account where it's registered (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains' successor Squarespace, Cloudflare and so on)? If you don't know which company that is, look your domain up at lookup.icann.org. It shows the registrar even when the owner's name is hidden for privacy.
• Is the account in your name and your email? Not your nephew's, not the agency's, not a former employee's.
• Does it auto-renew to a card you control? Domains that lapse can be bought by someone else.

Red flag: the domain is in a web company's account "to make things easier." Ask them to move it to an account in your name now, while you're on good terms.

2. Can you get your website's files?

Ask whoever built your site one question: "If I leave, what do I get?" Good answers: the files, a full export, or the login to the platform it's built on. Bad answers: "you'd need to rebuild," or a buyout fee.

Watch out for rental websites. A $300-a-month site costs $10,800 after three years, and if you cancel, it disappears. That can be a fine deal if you know that's what you're buying. It's a bad surprise if you thought you owned it.

3. Who owns your Google Business Profile?

This is often worth more than the website, because it's what puts you on the map. Sign in to Google Business Profile and open your profile's settings, then People and access.

• You should be listed as the primary owner. Agencies and helpers should be managers, not owners.
• If you can't get in at all, Google has a "request access" process for profiles someone else controls. It takes days, not minutes, so don't wait for an emergency.

4. Who has the logins?

Write down where the website is hosted, where your email lives, and who has the passwords for each. If the honest answer is "only my web guy," you have a single point of failure. A password manager with your own account fixes that for free.

5. What does the contract say about leaving?

Find the cancellation terms. Look for a minimum term (12 months is common), what happens to the site and domain when you leave, and any "release" or transfer fees. If there's no contract at all, get the answers from question 2 in an email so you have them in writing.

If you find a problem

1. Ask nicely first. Most web people will move a domain or add you as an owner if you ask clearly. Put the request in writing.
2. Move the domain to your own account. The registrar gives you a transfer code. Note that most registrars lock a domain against transfers for 60 days after it's registered or moved.
3. Become the primary owner of your Google profile, then remove access for people who no longer work with you.
4. Get a copy of the site before you change anything, so you're never starting from zero.

How BP Data handles it

We register your domain in your name from day one, the site's files are yours, and you stay the owner of your Google profile with us as a manager. Plans are month-to-month. If you leave, you keep your domain and Google profile, we send you the files, and the site stays on our hosting for 30 days while you move it. Help moving it is available for a fee we agree first.