We Hereby Declare Complete Digital Independence!

Every time we take on a new client, we’re surprised all over again to discover they arrive shackled, without free access to their own assets. The market still hasn’t grasped that today, the brand is the landlord and should own nearly all of its digital assets. Tens or hundreds of thousands of shekels and more get poured into site infrastructure and campaigns – it’s probably reasonable that it should be fully owned by you, right?

If only the issue stopped at getting ownership. In some cases, promotion agencies don’t just lock clients into their own infrastructure and assets – they also refuse to cooperate when it comes to granting access. A process that should take two clicks turns into a war of attrition.

In our view, it’s time to declare digital independence. To do that, it helps to start by understanding what’s involved, and what to aim for. Digital Independence Day – let’s get started.

Your website – really yours?

Let’s start with this: in our view, a “rental” model for your website isn’t the best option. A site we build can easily stay live for 7, 8, even 10 years, and paying rent the whole time just isn’t worth it for the brand. In other words, the rental model locks you into a specific vendor. And as we’ve said, we’re liberals – we believe in freedom.

Assuming you paid for your site as a one-time fee (as opposed to rent) – the site is yours. Don’t let anyone sell you stories, excuses, or reasons otherwise. The developer is somehow always on vacation in Thailand the moment you ask for your site. We make a point of stating in every agreement that the client is the sole owner of the website and is entitled to a copy of all its code. In our view, if you paid for the site – it’s yours! No vendor should refuse to hand over the code or its backup files.

Which platform gives us maximum freedom?

The short answer is WordPress. The longer answer: in the past, many sites were built Tailor Made, with dedicated custom code. Today, in our view, systems like WordPress outperform the alternatives on infrastructure, security, and performance, as well as on search engine indexing and long-term durability. WordPress is an excellent, recommended system. Built and configured correctly, it can be continuously updated and improved, so in theory the site can live forever.

There are various ways to build a site in WordPress. The most common is Elementor – an accessible, convenient, reliable, and strong tool. We use it even for building sites for publicly traded companies, and it’s without question a quality, flexible tool. In fact, it’s considered the industry standard. Elementor’s flexibility frees you from being locked into a single developer.

Within WordPress, it’s also possible – and often worthwhile – to build Tailor Made, custom-built sites. You’ll need a developer to implement changes down the road, but if they built the site to accepted standards, there’s nothing stopping other developers and professionals from working with it easily too.

In the ecommerce world, Shopify is an excellent platform for building online stores, and we recommend it warmly. There’s a wide range of ready-made templates, and you can also use custom code and development. It’s a strong, widely used platform we recommend highly.

When do problems come up? It happens more than once that promotion agencies build a template with closed-source code that only they can access. Unfortunately, that’s very hard to undo. That kind of setup forces the client to work only with the specific agency that built their site – other developers simply won’t be able to change or maintain the site, and won’t even want to try. As a rule, sites built on existing templates are less flexible and harder to change. As for relying on plugins and custom Shopify development – you can absolutely use both ready-made templates and custom code and development there.

As for other platforms, there’s no point surveying all of them – no reader would survive an article that long. It’s enough to know that WordPress and Shopify are the accepted standard, what’s called Best Practice. True, you can get locked in even with these, but if you ask the right questions and choose a quality vendor, you should end up with a system that’s fully your own, with complete freedom.

Platforms other than WordPress or Shopify tend to be more of a challenge. Not everyone will be familiar with them, you won’t always find every feature you need, and performance tends to be weaker too.

Important! Don’t forget to require full admin access to your site. That’s the keys to the building, and it’s crucial that they’re in your hands – especially if, at some point, you end your relationship with whoever built the site for you.

Domain – one address that can be worth its weight in gold

Your website address – the domain (like www.mysite.co.il, for example) — usually costs only around ₪75 a year, but its value is enormous, worth thousands of shekels and more, and it only grows with age and backlinks. Domains are a bit of a complex business, both technically and legally, but we’re happy to explain.

First: the domain is a piece of property that should be owned by you, just like a deed to an apartment or a house. No outside party should own your domain. The domain is yours – truly yours.

We recommend buying a domain for an Israeli site through LiveDNS, who offer excellent service in Hebrew. For English-language domains, we recommend Name.com. There are a few other good providers, but plenty of them (no names, but you’ll know what we mean if you’ve been there) will cost you a lot of aspirin to deal with. Buy the domain yourself through a recommended provider and rest easy knowing you’re the owner. Just don’t forget to renew it. Make sure to document who the owner is and who in the organization has access, so you never end up locked out of your own domain.

Now let’s complicate things a little. The domain connects to something called NS (nameservers), and under no circumstances should you get locked out of it. Your vendor can manage it for you, but if you want to make changes, you need either full access yourself or a vendor happy to make changes and redirects for you effectively. As always – it’s your asset, with convenient control built in.

If you’ve chosen to manage your NS through Cloudflare – first of all, well done, you clearly know what you’re doing! Second, don’t forget to properly document access and make sure you’re an admin there too, so you don’t get locked out of your own Cloudflare account.

Facebook, Instagram, and social networks

Most organizations today already understand how important it is to maintain social infrastructure as part of the brand’s marketing envelope. Your Facebook and Instagram pages have built up thousands of followers, sometimes more, and your ad infrastructure has accumulated data, pixels, and audiences. All of it should be fully owned by you. These are intellectual property with real business value – and real monetary value too. So how do you make that happen?

First, the right person from within the organization needs to be the owner of these assets. We recommend designating the owner, a lead partner, or a senior figure, plus two or three more people from within the organization. That way, you’re covered with access from multiple directions. The access level you need is exactly one thing: full ADMIN. This is your asset. Document who the owner is – that’s information you can’t afford to lose track of.

On Facebook, there are three separate entities – the business page, Business Manager, and the Ad Account. We won’t dive into the tedious explanation of what each one does, but we will stress this: you need to be the full owner and admin of all three.

Of course, your advertising agency also needs full admin access to run things properly – but alongside you, not instead of you. We strongly recommend putting your own credit card on the campaign and enjoying full transparency into both the campaign itself and the charges. This is your asset, and anyone with something to hide, has something to hide.

Don’t stop at just Facebook and Instagram! Make sure you’re a full admin on every platform (a partial list: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, X) and be diligent about documenting who has access, in an organized document.

Google in the land of the free

Google is a bit simpler than Facebook on this front. Here too, you’ll need someone from your organization to be full owner and admin – ideally two or three people. You need two types of admin access: one for the ad account, and one as the billing party. On every platform, make sure that once your credit card is attached, invoices go to the right payee and land in your inbox; you’ll submit those ad invoices to your accounting team to claim back on taxes. And in general, if you’re going to spend money on advertising, you should have access to everything – invoices included.

The exception to the rule — where is it okay not to have full ownership?

If you want the promotion agency to use its own credit card, keep in mind they’ll require the account to be under their ownership. Whoever pays, owns it. Even so, we recommend that you always, always be the paying party. In rare cases – like nonprofits or organizations that can’t pay by credit card – there’s a simple solution: a prepaid card.

In short, if you’re not the paying party, you may not end up the full owner of the ad accounts. All social media accounts and their linked pages, of course, must be your assets.

Outbrain and Taboola – if you rely on these platforms as your core advertising channel and they receive a serious budget, it’s recommended that they be owned by you. If they’re used intermittently or make up only a small part of the campaign, it’s fine for the advertising agency to run them for you under its own infrastructure. There are quite a few agencies, us included, that run content sites and influential portals, and in that case it makes sense that they’d want to advertise the portal under their own name – transparently, of course.

Lead management system – this really doesn’t need to be yours. Licensing and implementation can be expensive, and most agencies can offer you a solid end-to-end solution. You can switch to a different lead system at any stage and export your data to Excel in one click. If your vendor owns the lead system license, there’s really nothing to worry about – it’s a market standard that saves you time and money.

Hosting – you’re not a server farm, and you’re not a digital infrastructure company. You likely don’t need to own any server or hosting package, with all the overhead that comes with it. Let a professional manage hosting for you, as long as they provide you with a copy of the code and full management access to the admin panel and the domain. It’s worth the effort to find a reliable vendor who can manage hosting for you and provide comprehensive support across your whole digital infrastructure. You can manage hosting yourself, but it takes knowledge and time. In fact, in cases where brands manage their own hosting, we’ve run into no shortage of problems, glitches, and mismatched packages. Leave the servers to the professionals.

That’s it – now you can fire up the grill and declare that you have digital independence. You fully own all your assets and know what the right market standard looks like. If you’re still not the owner of all your infrastructure – we’d of course be happy to help you find a good home that believes in transparency.

Happy digital independence!