Five Keys Your Practice Should Never Hand Over

A practice owner we spoke with last year had paid for his website every month for nine years. He had the invoices. He had the design approvals. What he did not have was a single password, and when the agency folded, he discovered that the domain he had printed on two vehicles and four thousand brochures was registered to a company that no longer existed.

He got it back. It took four months, a lawyer, and a registrar dispute, and for six weeks of that the site was dark.

This is not a story about a bad agency. The agency was fine. It registered the domain the way most of them do, under its own account, because that was the fastest way to get the project moving on day one. Nobody made a decision. The decision got made by default, nine years earlier, by whoever typed their own email address into a registration form.

There are five accounts that decide whether you own your practice's presence or merely rent it. You should be able to log into all five. Not your office manager, not your marketing company. You.

The registrar is the one that matters

Your domain is the only asset in this list you cannot rebuild. A website can be redesigned in a month. A phone number can be ported. A domain that somebody else holds is somebody else's property, and under the registration rules the entity named as the registrant is the legal holder, regardless of who paid the renewal.

Log into your registrar. If you cannot name your registrar, that is the finding. Check two fields: the registrant organization and the administrative email. Your legal business name belongs in the first. An address you control belongs in the second.

DNS, which is the switchboard

DNS decides where your domain points. Website here, email there, booking link somewhere else. It is the lever that moves your whole practice from one vendor to another in about an hour, and it is also the lever that takes your email down if somebody edits the wrong record.

Control of DNS is usually separate from control of the domain. An agency can hold your DNS while you hold your registrar, which means you can leave but you cannot take your email with you without a rebuild. Find out which account hosts your DNS zone and whether you have a login to it.

Hosting, and whose name is on the invoice

If your hosting is billed to your agency and re-billed to you, you do not have a hosting account. You have a line item. That matters for two reasons. The first is that you have nothing to withhold if the relationship turns. The second is that your hosting provider is handling the inquiries patients submit through your contact form, and if you are not the account holder, you cannot ask that provider what it has agreed to protect.

We will come back to that one in a later post, because the answer surprises people.

Admin on your own website

Not an editor account. Not a contributor account that lets you fix a typo. Administrator, the role that can see every user, every plugin, and every integration somebody wired into your site over the past five years.

Open the user list and read it. Most practices find between four and nine accounts they cannot account for: a developer who left, a contractor hired for one project in 2021, a plugin vendor's support login that was never removed. Every one of those is a door.

Ad accounts, pixels, and three years of learning

The industry standard is that the client owns the ad account. We hold that line for a reason that has nothing to do with principle. An ad account that has been running for three years is carrying three years of conversion history, and that history is what the bidding system uses to decide which click is worth buying. Rebuild the account and you throw the history away.

Practices that switch agencies and get handed a fresh account pay for that twice: once in the setup, and again for a quarter of worse cost per lead while a new system relearns what the old one already knew.

When you fail one of the five

Failing one is normal. Four of the five practices that run this audit fail at least one, and the fix is usually an email, not a dispute. Ask for the transfer in writing, give a date, and say what you want handed over: account ownership, not a seat on the account.

A vendor who moves on that request in a week is a vendor worth keeping. A vendor who explains why ownership would be confusing for you has told you something important about what happens the day you try to leave.

Where this is going

Ownership of the five keys is the floor. The posts that follow this one go after the things built on top of that floor: who has actually signed an agreement to protect your patients' information, what your staff is already pasting into AI tools, why nobody in this industry can tell you which advertisement produced a collected dollar, and what happens to three years of call recordings when you change phone vendors.

None of it is complicated. All of it is invisible until somebody asks the question out loud.