Nobody chooses a website provider expecting to leave. But it happens all the time, for ordinary reasons. The provider shuts down or gets bought. The price goes up. You outgrow what they offer. The developer who built your site takes a job in Dubai.
The time to find out what you can take with you is before you sign, when you have the most leverage. Not the week you want to go.
What should be yours
Separate two things: the software that runs your site, and the business information you put into it.
The software, the design system and the code usually belong to the provider. That is normal. You are paying to use them, the same way you use a phone network without owning the towers.
Your business information is different. This should be yours, in full:
- Your domain name
- Every listing: descriptions, prices, areas, addresses, RERA numbers
- Every photograph, in its original quality
- Every enquiry, with name, phone, email, the property asked about, and the date
- Pages you wrote: your about page, locality guides, articles
- Testimonials you collected from your own clients
If a provider is vague about any of these, treat it as a warning sign.
The domain is the one that hurts
Of everything on that list, the domain matters most. Everything Google has learned about your site over the years, which pages to show and for which searches, is attached to your web address. Your cards, your hoardings and years of old WhatsApp messages all point to it.
If the domain is registered in your provider's name, leaving means either negotiating to get it back or starting again at a new address. Starting again means new cards and, often, a long wait to be found on Google again. Make sure it is in your name from day one. There is more on this in choosing a domain name.
Questions to ask, in writing
Ask any provider these before you pay. Get the answers in an email, not just on a call.
- Can I download all my listings, including photos, whenever I like?
- Can I download all my enquiries as a spreadsheet, without asking you?
- Is the domain registered in my name, and do I have my own login to it?
- How much notice do I need to give, and what happens to the site on the last day?
- How long do you keep my data after I leave, and will you delete it if I ask?
- Will you help point my domain to a new provider when I go?
The spreadsheet format most systems offer is called CSV. It opens in Excel or Google Sheets, and almost any other system can import it. If a provider can only give you your data as a PDF or a set of screenshots, it is not really yours to move.
We have put these alongside other buying questions in ten questions to ask any website provider.
Habits that make leaving easy
Even with a good provider, keep your own copies. It costs you very little.
Once a month, download your enquiries and save the file somewhere you control. Keep original photos in your own Google Drive or on a hard disk, not only on the website. Keep a simple sheet of your active listings. Picture a builder in Bhubaneswar who does this: if their provider vanished tomorrow, they would lose a website, not a business.
Enquiries are also other people's personal details. India's data protection law, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, broadly places responsibility for that information on the business that collects it. Knowing where your leads are stored, who can see them, and how to get them out is part of handling them properly. If this matters a great deal to your business, ask a lawyer about the details.
When you do switch
If you move, do it in a careful order.
- Get the new site ready before the old one is switched off.
- Download everything from the old provider first.
- Ask the new provider to set up redirects, which are instructions that send anyone visiting an old page address to the matching new page, so old links and Google do not hit dead ends.
- Only then point your domain to the new site.
Handled this way, a switch costs you a few weeks of effort, not years of work. We have written about what to do once the new site is up in the first 90 days after your website goes live.
This week, try downloading your enquiries from whatever you use today, whether that is a website, a portal account or a CRM, the software some offices use to track customers. If you cannot do it in five minutes, you have learned something important about who really holds your leads.
