Whose Name Is On The Account?
Hold the title, and let your provider hold the keys.
A Saturday morning with a laptop, your phone and a cup of coffee. Do it in this order.
The weekend version.
You can do the whole audit on a Saturday morning with a laptop, your phone and a cup of coffee. Do it in this order.
Screenshots of the screens named in these steps are being prepared and will carry the date they were taken.
1Find your registrar and your expiry date
Look up who your domain is registered with, log in, and write down the expiry date. Turn on auto-renew. Check that the card on file is current and that the renewal emails go to an inbox you read. If you cannot log in, that is your first finding, and it goes at the top of the audit.
2Write down who owns each of the four
For the domain, the hosting, the Google accounts and the ad accounts, log in and look at the list of users. Write down who is listed as owner, who is listed as admin, and whose phone or email would get the recovery code if the password were lost. Anybody on those lists you do not recognize, or who no longer works with you, gets a note.
3Screenshot your DNS records
In your domain account there is a list of records that point your name at your website and your email. You do not need to understand them. Take screenshots of the whole list and save them somewhere safe with today’s date. If a future edit breaks your email, those screenshots give whoever fixes it a record of exactly what was there before. While you are there, ask whether you have the three records that keep your mail out of spam. If you are not sure, that goes on the list for your provider.
4Export your site once
Get one full copy of your website, files and content, and store it somewhere your host cannot touch: your own cloud storage, a drive in your office, ideally both. One copy you control is worth more than a dozen copies sitting on the same server as the site.
5Turn on two-factor everywhere it is offered
Domain, hosting, Google, each ad account, and the email address they all recover to. Make sure the codes come to your phone.
6Fill in the Ownership Audit
with what you found, including the rows that say "I don’t know." Then send the brief from earlier in this chapter to whoever controls the rows that are not yours.
The worksheet.
Fill it in on your phone. It saves on your device and prints clean.
The Ownership Audit
Saves on this device as you go. Nothing is sent to us.
Log in to each account, look at the list of users, and write down what you find, including the rows where the honest answer is "I don’t know."
Priority: the Google accounts and the ad accounts come first, because what they hold cannot be rebuilt. Then the domain. Then the hosting.
The four titles
The rule: each one in my name, on my card, with my login, and with the two-factor codes coming to my phone. A provider is an admin, never the owner.
The domain
Two-factor
Backups
Users I do not recognize, or who no longer work with us
Brief sent to whoever controls the rows that are not mine
Check it took
Check it took.
on Monday, sign out of everything. Then sign back in to each of the four as yourself, on your own phone, and see your name listed as owner. If any one of them sends a code to somebody else’s phone, it has not taken yet.
Where it stops being a weekend job.
Some of this you should not do alone. Moving a domain or rewriting email records on a Saturday afternoon, without somebody who has done it before, is how a small problem becomes a quiet week. Here is the decision rule.
Someone else owns one of the four accounts and you cannot change that from your side. Or your email records are wrong or missing, or you found inquiries in spam. Or nobody can prove a backup of your site restores. Or there is a duplicate listing for your business you cannot claim. Or the audit turned up logins and connections left over from an earlier setup that nobody can explain.
For ownership, the current provider, by transferring each account to you and staying on as an admin. That is a routine request and most providers have handled it before. For a registrar move, email records or a restore, someone who has moved a domain and its records before without taking the email down on the way. That can be the provider you already pay, a relative who builds websites, or us. Ask them how many they have done and what they check afterward.
Two things. First, you log in as owner on each of the four, yourself, on your phone, while they are not in the room. Second, a restore test: they take your latest backup and bring it up on a scratch site, a throwaway copy at a temporary address, and you click around it and see your own pages. Until you have seen that scratch site, the backup is still a hope.
Ryan, my web guy handles all that.
Good. I mean that. A business with somebody reliable watching the domain, the hosting and the backups is ahead of most of the ones I see.
This chapter is not asking you to take the work away from him. It is how you check, and what to ask him for. Handling it and owning it are different jobs. He can handle the renewals, the updates, the backups and the fixes while you hold the title. That setup protects him too. If something goes wrong, nobody has to wonder whose account it was.
So take the Ownership Audit to him. Ask him to fill in the parts you cannot. Give him the brief above. If the answers come back clean, you just spent an hour confirming that your web guy is as good as you thought, and that is worth an hour. If they come back "it’s under my account, but it’s fine," that is not a problem with him. It is a to-do list.
The one question I would not let slide: "When did we last restore a backup, and where?" A good web person has an answer to that, or will have one next week.
Tools and next.
The two tools the book points to, then the chapters on either side of this one.
Elevated Page Check
Click it on any page for a score out of 100, the fixes that matter most, and eight tabs that show the headings, links, photos, schema, share preview and business details behind the page, in plain English. Nothing here for it to check. The Quick Links tab does open the Wayback Machine for any page, which is how you prove what your site looked like on a given date. Nothing it reads leaves your computer.
How it works and where to get it →Done for youFree online presence report
Your listing, your business details, your reviews, your site speed and the heat map, scored from the outside. It asks for your email so we can send it.
Get the report →Nearby chapters
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 15
Page last updated October 26, 2026. The steps get updated when Google changes something. Found a step that no longer matches your screen? Email ryan@elevatedideas.com or call or text (217) 724-8153.
Maintained by Elevated Ideas, a U.S.-based agency in Jacksonville, Illinois. All chapters.
Hold the title. Let your provider hold the keys.
The free online presence report is the one thing in the book we ask you to let us run: the outside view of your listing, your details, your reviews, your speed and the map.
Prefer to talk? Call or text (217) 724-8153 or email ryan@elevatedideas.com.