Here's an uncomfortable truth: paying for a website doesn't automatically mean you own it. Ownership comes down to three specific things, and if you don't check them before you pay, you might find out the hard way that your "own" website isn't actually yours to control.
1. Who owns the domain name?
Your domain (yourbusiness.com.ng) should be registered under your own name and email, with you holding the login to the registrar account (Whogohost, Namecheap, etc.) — not your developer's account "on your behalf." If your developer registered it under their own details, they technically control it, and renewing, transferring, or even keeping it active depends on staying on good terms with them indefinitely.
2. Who owns the hosting account?
Hosting is where your website's files actually live. If your developer set up hosting under their own account and never gave you access, they hold the keys to whether your site stays online at all. Ask for your own hosting login — or at minimum, admin access to the account — as a non-negotiable part of any website project.
3. Do you have a copy of the source files?
A finished website should come with a copy of its actual files — the code, images, and content that make it work — delivered to you or stored somewhere you control (a folder, a GitHub repository, a zip file emailed to you). Without this, if anything ever goes wrong with the hosting or the relationship with your developer, you have nothing to hand to someone else to pick up where things left off.
The one-sentence test
Ask yourself: "If my developer vanished tomorrow, could I hire someone else to take over immediately?" If the honest answer is no, you don't fully own your website yet — regardless of how much you already paid for it.
None of this is difficult or expensive to get right. It just has to be asked for upfront, in plain language, before any money changes hands.