When something is wrong, whose problem is it
A demand letter arrives about a website the owner did not build, hosted on a platform they do not control, designed by somebody who left two years ago. Somebody still has to answer it.
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Short answer
Responsibility for what a website says and does normally sits with the business publishing it, whoever built it. Suppliers carry whatever their contract gives them. Platforms provide tools rather than assurances. Knowing which duties you cannot delegate, and writing the rest into agreements, is the part worth doing before anything goes wrong.
The default is the business
Your website is your advertising. The claims on it are your claims, the prices are your prices, and the data it collects is data you hold.
That stays true when somebody else typed the words. A designer writing a sentence does not transfer the claim to the designer.
So the starting position is simple. It is yours, and everything else is about what you agreed with the people who helped.
That is also how a regulator or a customer will see it. The name on the site is the name on the claim, whoever typed the sentence.
What a supplier owes you
Whatever the contract says, and often less than either side assumed. Many small web projects have no written scope at all.
If accessibility, performance or standards matter to you, they belong in the agreement in writing, with a standard named.
Ask about it before signing rather than after a complaint, when the conversation is much harder and the answer is usually out of scope.
What a platform provides
Tools. A platform can give you accessible components, valid markup and checks that run before publishing. That is real and it is not the same as a promise about your site.
The moment you add a widget, upload a document or write a claim, you are outside anything the platform can check.
Be wary of any platform describing itself as making you compliant. It cannot know what you will publish tomorrow.
Be wary of any platform describing itself as making you compliant. It cannot know what you will publish tomorrow, which is the limit set out in overlays, honestly.
What you cannot hand off
Whether your claims are true. Whether your licence is current. Whether your alt text describes the real photograph. Whether you have permission for that testimonial.
Nobody outside your business can answer those, which is why they end up being the findings that matter.
They are the questions an auditor asks last and a complaint raises first. A supplier can build you a technically clean site that still carries a claim you cannot support.
They are also the cheapest to get right, because they need knowledge rather than budget.
These are also the cheapest items to get right, because they need knowledge rather than budget — and they are the ones that actually mislead somebody when they are wrong.
The handover that never happened
When a site changes hands, the records usually do not. Font licences, stock image receipts, analytics accounts, domain control, the list of third parties.
Ask for all of it at handover and store it somewhere that survives staff changes.
The most common version of this problem is discovering years later that nobody can prove an image was licensed.
Ask for it as a list rather than a promise. A folder handed over at the end is worth more than an assurance given at the start.
- Font licences
- Stock image receipts and licence terms
- The domain registration, in your name
- Hosting and DNS access
- The analytics property
- The list of third parties the site loads
- The source files, and who may edit them
Writing it into the agreement
Name the accessibility standard and level. Say who fixes findings and at whose cost. Say who owns the assets and who holds the licences.
Say what happens at the end: who gets the files, the accounts and the records.
None of this needs to be long. A page of plain terms prevents nearly every argument that actually happens.
A page of plain terms prevents nearly every argument that actually happens, and the questions worth asking first are in questions to ask a web provider.
How we describe our own part
Every page written by Website Builder Studio passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. That is a description of what we do, not a claim about your legal position.
The in-app assistant is explicit about which findings a person still has to judge, because those are the ones that stay yours.
Nothing here is legal advice, and where a duty actually falls is a question for a lawyer who knows your business.
Questions people ask
My developer built it, so is it their problem?
Only to the extent your contract says so. The advertising and the data are generally the business's responsibility whoever typed them.
Does using a reputable platform protect me?
It removes a class of technical faults, which is worth a lot. It cannot vouch for claims you write or files you upload.
What should I ask a new supplier?
Which standard they build to, what they check before handover, who fixes findings later, and what records come with the site.
We inherited a site with no records. What now?
Inventory what it loads and uses, replace anything you cannot document, and start keeping records from today. That is usually cheaper than proving history.
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