What should be in a web design contract? Five clauses to check before you sign
There is one assumption that costs UK trades more than any other, and it is a perfectly reasonable one everywhere else in the job: that paying for something makes it yours. Buy a van and it is your van. Fit a boiler and it becomes the customer's boiler the moment they settle up.
Websites do not work like that, and the reason is not sharp practice, it is the law. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 the person who creates a work owns the copyright in it, and paying an invoice does not move that ownership across. It moves by an assignment in writing, or it does not move at all.
The same goes for everything else you would assume is automatic: the domain, the hosting, the photos you took on site, the right to take the files somewhere else next year. None of it is automatic. All of it is whatever the contract says, and nothing beyond that. So the document is not paperwork to skim on the way to the deposit. It is the only thing that decides what you are left holding if it ends badly, which is the single scenario a contract is for.
A UK web design contract should settle five things: who owns the copyright in the finished site and when it transfers, who is named as the domain registrant, the minimum term and how the agreement ends, the licence covering your photos and copy, and what you receive on the way out. Scope, price and timings matter too, but those five decide what you own when it is over.
The five clauses that decide anything
A web design contract can run to twelve clauses or forty, but only five of them change what you walk away with, and each has a version that reads fine and a version that should stop the conversation.
Everything else in the document, the payment schedule, the revision rounds, the liability cap, is about how the job runs. These five are about who holds what when the job is over. Find them first.
| Clause | What good looks like | What should stop you |
|---|---|---|
| Copyright and ownership | Assigned to you in writing at a named point | Not mentioned at all, or "licensed while the plan is active" |
| Minimum term | A number of months, stated plainly | "Cancel any time" with a commitment elsewhere in the document |
| Domain registrant | Named as you or your company | "We manage your domain" with no registrant named |
| Content licence | Your material stays yours, licence ends with the contract | A perpetual licence over everything you supply |
| Exit and handover | Files, content and domain authorisation, within a stated window | Silent, or a handover "fee to be confirmed" |
Ownership: the invoice does not transfer the copyright
Section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gives first ownership of a work to the person who created it, and commissioning the work does not change that, so a contract silent on ownership leaves the site with the designer.
This is the clause that surprises people, and it is worth being precise about because the half-remembered version does more harm than the law itself. Copyright in the code, the layout and the design belongs to the author from the moment it exists. The Act makes one exception, for work made by an employee in the course of employment, where the employer owns it. A freelancer or an agency is not your employee. So the default across England and Wales is that they own it and you have an implied licence to use it.
An implied licence is not nothing. It is also not a thing you can quantify, sell with the business, or rely on in an argument, and it certainly does not entitle you to take the files to a new developer and have them rework the design. Copyright moves by assignment, and an assignment has to be in writing and signed by the person giving it up. One paragraph. It costs the designer nothing to include and it is the single most valuable sentence in the document.
The question to ask
"Does copyright in the finished website assign to my business, and at what point?" The second half matters as much as the first. On assignment at final payment, you own it from launch. On assignment after twelve months, you are renting it for a year, which may be perfectly fair as a trade for no upfront cost, but you should know that is the deal you are doing rather than discover it.
The minimum term is a different sentence to the cancellation clause
A contract can truthfully say you may cancel at any time and still commit you to twelve months of payments, because "when may I stop" and "what do I still owe" are two separate questions and most documents answer them in two separate places.
This is not usually deception. It is what happens when marketing copy says one thing and clause 9 says another, and nobody rereads the marketing copy afterwards. Read the two together, and read them as a single answer: if I want out in month four, what do I pay?
The wider version of this question, whether a monthly arrangement or a one off build leaves you better placed, is worth thinking through before you get to any specific contract, and I have set out both sides of it in paying monthly against paying once. The contract does not decide which model is right for you. It only decides whether the model you chose is the one you actually got.
The domain clause is the one you cannot rebuild
Losing the website costs you a rebuild, but losing the domain costs you every ranking, every review link and every van, invoice and business card carrying the address, which is why the registrant line matters more than anything else on the page.
"We will manage your domain" is not an ownership statement. The registrant is the legal holder, and that is a different question from who registered it, who administers it or who pays the renewal. The contract should name your business as registrant in plain words.
Then verify it rather than trusting it, because this is checkable in about two minutes and the results are frequently not what people expect. I ran the check across 412 real British trade domains pulled from my own lead sheets, and the full method and figures are in who actually owns your domain name. What happens to the domain and the hosting on the day the payments stop is covered separately in what happens when you stop paying for your website.
The content licence, and the photos you took
Photographs you took are yours because you are the author of them, so the content clause is not about who owns your work but about what licence you granted, how long it lasts, and whether you can reuse the finished page copy elsewhere.
Two directions to read this in, and most trades only read one. Outbound, you are granting the agency a licence over your logo, your job photos and your business details. Fine, they need it to build the thing. The questions are whether the licence ends when the contract does and whether they may keep the site in their portfolio afterwards, which is usually reasonable if it is stated.
Inbound is the half people miss. The page copy written about your services, your towns and your guarantees is a piece of work in its own right, and if it was written for you rather than by you, the same copyright default applies to it. Two thousand words of accurate, rewritten service copy is not trivial to replace, and finding out you cannot take it with you is a bad afternoon.
The practical risk is not legal
It is storage. Whatever the licence says, the only full resolution copies of your job photos are often sitting on somebody else's server, resized down to 1600 pixels wide on the live site. Keep your own originals from the first day of the build. That is a habit rather than a clause, and it removes most of the sting from this section entirely.
Cancellation, and the cooling off period you probably do not have
The fourteen day cancellation right people assume they have is a consumer right, and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 define a consumer as an individual acting wholly or mainly outside their trade or business, so a sole trader buying a website for the trade is outside it.
Regulation 4 of the 2013 Regulations is where that definition sits, and it is worth reading once because it is short and it settles a lot of arguments. If you are commissioning the site for your business, and every tradesperson reading this is, the statutory cooling off period is not behind you. There is no fourteen days. The cancellation clause in the contract is the entirety of your protection, which is exactly why it deserves a proper read rather than a scroll.
That cuts both ways and it is fair to say so. It also means a business contract can offer terms a consumer contract cannot, and a provider who chooses to give you a refund window or a get out is doing it voluntarily. Those are worth having in writing precisely because nothing obliges them.
What a real trade contract looks like, clause by clause
My own published terms run to twelve numbered clauses, and only five of them change what a client ends up owning, which is the ratio worth expecting from any honest document.
Rather than describe an ideal contract in the abstract, here is the actual structure of the terms I publish and work under, marked for which clauses do the work described above. It is not a template to copy. It is a specimen, so you can see the shape and check the one you have been sent against it.
Twelve clauses, and the five that decide anything
| 1. Who we are | Trading identity and contact |
| 2. The service and current price | Scope, figures, what is not included |
| 3. Free mockups, no obligation | Who owns concepts before you commission |
| 4. Payment and starting work | Payment points, overdue invoices |
| 5. Your role in the project | Content, approvals, effect on timings |
| 6. Ownership and third-party materials | Clause one of the five |
| 7. Cancelling the service | Clauses two and five: term and exit |
| 8. Cancellation rights for consumers | The regulation 4 point above, stated openly |
| 9. Results, availability and liability | No ranking guarantees, liability cap |
| 10. Portfolio use | Clause four: the content licence |
| 11. Governing law | England and Wales |
| 12. Changes to these terms | Which version applies to your project |
The domain registrant clause, clause three of the five, sits inside 6 and 7 here rather than standing alone. That is common, and it is the reason to search the document for the word "registrant" rather than to look for a heading with the word "domain" in it.
The five questions, in writing
Send these as one email before you sign anything. Any provider working in good faith will answer all five in a couple of minutes, and the speed of the reply tells you nearly as much as the content of it.
How this works if you build with me
I hand-code websites for UK trades and I will make a free mockup of your real business before you pay anything, no deposit. There is no build fee: the Website plan is £50 every four weeks and covers the site, hosting, domain, SSL, security and unlimited small edits. Three months minimum, rolling after that, and after twelve months the website is yours to keep, domain and files transferred, no exit fee. The domain is registered in your name from day one either way. Live in about a week. See trade website design in Lancing or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.