What happens to your website when you stop paying
Most UK tradespeople choosing a website ask what it costs a month. Almost nobody asks the question that actually decides whether the money was well spent, which is what they are left holding if they walk away. I went through the published terms of six UK companies that sell websites to trades. One of them states plainly that if you cancel inside twelve months, the website files are not handed over. Another registers your domain in its own name and manages it for you. Four say nothing on the subject at all.
None of that is a scandal. Nothing upfront has to be paid for somehow, and holding the files for a term is a normal way to do it. The problem is that the clause is usually discovered two years later, by a bloke who assumed the website he had been paying for every month was in some sense his.
On a rented monthly plan, stopping payment normally takes a UK trade website offline within days, and the files stay with the provider until any minimum term is served. Digital Tradies publishes that files are yours after 12 months and not before. On a one-off build such as Sitework's £600, the site and domain are yours from launch, and cancelling the £20 a month care plan does not take them away.
The six providers, and what their terms actually say
Of six UK trade website companies checked in August 2026, only two state in public what happens to your website if you cancel, and the two answers are completely different.
| Provider | Model | Published cancellation term |
|---|---|---|
| Digital Tradies | £49 to £79/mo | Files yours after 12 months, not before |
| TradeBolt | £39/mo | Access paused if you do not upgrade |
| MyTradeSite | £49/mo | Domain registered and managed by them |
| iTrades | From £999 | Not published |
| SwiftLead | Not published | Not published |
| Sitework | £600 + £20/mo | Yours from launch, domain included |
Checked directly: each term above comes from the company's own live pricing page in August 2026. Terms change, so read the current page before signing. The full price comparison sits in UK trade website companies compared.
The domain is the bit that really hurts
Losing a website costs you a rebuild, but losing the domain costs you every ranking, every backlink and every printed van, card and invoice that carries the address.
A website is a few files. Painful to lose, but a competent builder can put a better one back in a week. The domain is different. It is the thing Google has spent two years associating with your trade and your town, the thing your reviews link to, and the thing painted down the side of your van. Move to a new address and you start that clock again from zero.
This is why a free domain thrown into a monthly plan deserves a hard look. Registered in your name it is a genuine perk. Registered in theirs it is a tether. You can check yours in about a minute with a WHOIS lookup at Nominet, which runs the .uk register. If the registrant is not you or your limited company, that is the first thing to fix, and it is usually fixable by asking.
The knock-on effects are the part people underestimate. Your email usually sits on the same domain, so losing it takes your inbox with it, along with every quote thread and every customer who has your address saved. Google Business Profile links to the domain, so the profile has to be re-verified against a new one. Any directory listing, supplier account or insurance document carrying the old address becomes wrong on the same afternoon. None of that is fatal, but it is a fortnight of dull admin you did not plan for, in the middle of whatever made you leave in the first place.
Four checks to run before you sign anything
Domain registrant, the cancellation clause, the minimum term and your own content backup are the four answers that decide what you keep, and all four should be given in writing without argument.
What actually goes missing, in order of pain
The job photos are the loss trades regret most, because the originals were taken on a phone that has since been sold, wiped or dropped down a drain.
Page copy can be rewritten in an afternoon. Reviews mostly live on your Google Business Profile rather than the website, so they usually survive. Enquiry records held in a provider's dashboard are annoying to lose but rarely business-critical. The photos are the real casualty. Four years of finished bathrooms, boarded lofts and re-pointed brickwork, shot properly and colour-corrected by whoever built the site, existing nowhere else at full resolution.
If you take one practical thing from this, it is to back the photos up tonight rather than when you are already annoyed with someone. The same argument applies to the ones you have not taken yet, covered in what to fix in the quiet months.
There is a second-order loss worth naming too. A site that has been live for two or three years has accumulated something you cannot photograph: Google's understanding of what you do and where. The service pages that finally started ranking, the town page that took eight months to move, the internal structure someone thought about. Rebuild on a new domain and the copy can be recreated in a day, but that understanding restarts from nothing. It is the reason a domain in your own name is worth more than any single feature a provider can bolt on, and it is the argument for sorting the paperwork while you are happy with them rather than when you are not.
Where a provider holding the files is genuinely fair
A twelve month file-retention term is a reasonable trade for a build with nothing paid upfront, because the provider has carried the whole cost of the work before earning it back.
Worth saying plainly, because the ownership argument gets pitched dishonestly by people in my line of work. If a company builds you a site for £0 upfront and you leave in month two, they have done several days of work for £98. Keeping the files until the build is paid off is not sharp practice, it is the same logic as a staged payment on a kitchen. The problem is never the clause. It is the clause being unwritten, or written and never mentioned.
The providers worth avoiding are not the ones with a term. They are the ones who will not tell you what the term is. Same instinct as a customer who will not put a price in writing: it is usually a sign of what comes later. That instinct is also the one that should govern how you handle your own business email address, which sits on the same domain and disappears with it.
The straight answer for a working trade
If the website is carrying real enquiries, own it; if you are still testing whether the work is there, rent it and keep the term short.
A site that brings in one bathroom a month is an asset and should be treated like one, which means the domain in your name and the files on your own drive. A site that exists so referrals can check you are real is a utility, and renting a utility is fine. The mistake is drifting from the second into the first without ever revisiting the paperwork, which is what happens to most trades I speak to. If you are also weighing what a directory profile holds over you, the same question applies to whether you own your Checkatrade reviews.
There is a decent halfway house that nobody sells, because it is not a product: stay on the rented plan, but get the domain moved into your own name while you are still a happy customer. Most providers will do it without argument, it costs nothing, and it converts the worst version of leaving into an ordinary inconvenience. If a provider will not move a domain into the name of the business paying for it, you have learned something useful for about the price of an email.
See yours before you pay anything
I build a free mockup of your actual business before any money changes hands. If you want it, it is £600 to build, split £300 to start and £300 on final approval, then £20 a month for hosting, SSL, security, domain renewal and unlimited small edits. The site and the domain are yours from the day it goes live, and the care plan is rolling, so stopping it does not take your website away. If you are in West Sussex I am local, see trade website design in Shoreham-by-Sea. Apply at sitework.uk/#apply.