Who owns your website: the GPL, and what it leaves out

The question people mean when they ask this is narrower and more practical: if this goes badly, can I take my site files and leave?

For WordPress the answer is mostly yes, for a reason worth understanding. For hosted site builders the answer is documented much less clearly than you would expect. And the GPL leaves the CSS and the artwork in your supplier’s hands, which is the part your contract has to answer.

The theme’s code: the GPL, and its grey area

WordPress is released under the GPLv2 or later, and WordPress.org’s position is that “Derivatives of WordPress code inherit the GPL license.”

It does not stop there, and the honest version of this page should not either. The same page says: “There is some legal grey area regarding what is considered a derivative work,” before adding, “we feel strongly that plugins and themes are derivative work and thus inherit the GPL license.”

That is a stated position, not a court ruling. Treat anyone who presents it as settled law with mild suspicion.

The detail comes from an opinion the Software Freedom Law Center wrote for WordPress in 2009, summarised by Matt Mullenweg in a single line: “PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.”

The reasoning is that a theme’s PHP is loaded by WordPress, combined with its code in memory, and consists largely of calls to WordPress functions, so “the PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code.” CSS and images, by contrast, “exist purely as data to be served by a web server,” and are therefore separate works.

The part that is not automatically yours

Follow that to its conclusion, because this is the sentence your contract needs to answer.

The same opinion says third-party developers “may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish”. The elements there are the CSS, the images, the artwork. The design layer is the part that is not covered by the GPL.

So a supplier can hand you a theme whose PHP you may freely use, modify and move, while retaining rights over the stylesheet and the graphics that make it look like anything. Legally consistent. Commercially unpleasant if you discover it during a divorce.

Ask for it in writing. Not “do I own the site”, because the answer will be a confident yes that means less than it sounds. Ask: who owns the CSS, the artwork, the logo files and the photography, and may I use them if you are not involved?

Two more that cost nothing to ask and everything to skip:

• Third-party assets travel under their own terms. Licensed fonts, stock photography and commercial plugins are not yours because the site is. Get the list.
• Who holds the accounts? Domain registrar, DNS, host, analytics. A theme you own is no use if the domain is in someone else’s name.

Leaving WordPress

WordPress’s own export tool produces an XML file, WXR, which the documentation says “will contain your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and users.”

Note what that sentence is: a list of what is included. The documentation does not enumerate exclusions, so treat any confident list of what the export leaves behind, including one on a page like this, as unsourced unless it cites something. The practical move is to take a full backup, files and database, not only the XML.

And if the site was built with a page builder, remember where the layout lives. Per Elementor’s developer documentation it is stored “in a JSON format as WordPress post metadata,” in a private custom field, rendered by Elementor’s own frontend. Your text exports. Your design exports as an opaque blob only that plugin can read.

Leaving a hosted builder

This is where the asymmetry shows. What follows is limited to what each company documents in public.

Squarespace publishes an export guide. Per that guide, the export covers layout pages, one blog page with its posts, text blocks, image blocks and gallery pages. It does not cover other page types such as album, cover, index, portfolio and store pages, page-specific headers and footers, additional blog pages, audio, product and video blocks, drafts, style settings, or custom CSS. Verify the current list before relying on it; these pages change.

Wix is the more interesting case. Searching its Help Center from the top, the articles on managing a site cover duplicating a site, site history, and transferring a site to another Wix account. I could not find an article documenting export of a site’s pages or design to another platform.

The correct statement is therefore: no documented export path was found in Wix’s Help Center. Not “Wix will not let you leave”. Absence of an article is not proof of absence, and Wix does provide CSV exports for some business data. But if portability matters to you, the absence of a documented path is itself the finding, and it is worth asking their support directly before you build there.

What we do

The exit is a line item. Ownership transfer and admin handover is $100 in the configurator, ticked by default, sitting between the contact form and the launch checklist. Arriving is priced the same way: migration $200, a redirect map from the old URLs $150, and $50 for each page of content moved. Both directions are on the page before you buy, and that is the part worth holding any supplier to.

Every site this studio builds ships with the theme source, and the case-study record for each engagement lists what was delivered and what was still missing at handover. One of those lists includes an unresolved www. redirect and a set of files that did not exist yet, written down rather than left to be discovered.

That is the standard worth holding a supplier to, more than any ownership clause: did they tell you what you did not get?

Who should not worry about this

If you are three months old, testing whether the business works, and choosing between a builder and a custom site, build it on whatever gets you selling this month. Portability is a problem worth having later. Just know which decision you are making.

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