What Happens to Your WordPress or Squarespace Website When You Die?

A personal blog, a small business site, or an online store built on WordPress or Squarespace represents real, ongoing value — content, SEO history, and sometimes active revenue — that most estate plans completely overlook. Unlike a domain name (a registration record) or a social media profile (a personal account), a website is really two separate things bundled together: the hosting/platform account that runs it, and the domain that points to it. They don't always transfer the same way, and the process differs sharply depending on which platform the site is built on.

This guide walks through how Squarespace, WordPress, and hosting providers each handle this differently, what separates the domain problem from the website problem, and the simple advance-planning step that makes nearly everything else in this guide unnecessary.

Two Different Problems: The Website and the Domain

Before anything else, it helps to separate these clearly. The domain (e.g., yoursite.com) is a registration record, generally handled through the process covered in our domain names after death guide. The website itself — the actual content, design, and platform account that generates the pages people see — is a separate asset governed by whatever hosting provider or website builder it runs on. Sorting out one does not automatically sort out the other, and families are often surprised to discover this only after successfully recovering a domain, only to find the website behind it still inaccessible.

Squarespace's Dedicated Deceased-Owner Process

Squarespace is unusual among website platforms in that it has built an actual, documented process for this exact situation. If you're representing a deceased Squarespace site owner or their estate, Squarespace provides a specific request form to gain access to their site. After review (and possibly some follow-up questions), Squarespace grants access, after which you can either update the billing information to keep the site published and running, or cancel the subscription along with any connected domains or Google Workspace services.

This is a meaningfully more direct process than most competitors offer, but it still requires proactive action — Squarespace does not automatically detect a death or reach out to families.

WordPress.com vs. Self-Hosted WordPress: A Critical Difference

This distinction trips up more people than almost anything else in this guide, because "WordPress" actually refers to two very different setups:

WordPress.com (the hosted service) works like most online accounts — content and settings live inside a WordPress.com account, and there's no dedicated deceased-user process publicized the way Squarespace has. Families generally need to go through general WordPress.com support with proof of death and, ideally, documentation of authority over the estate, similar to the generic process used by many smaller platforms.

Self-hosted WordPress (the free, open-source software installed on your own hosting account) is fundamentally different — there's no "WordPress account" governing access at all. Whoever controls the hosting account (Bluehost, SiteGround, etc.) and the site's admin login effectively controls the site. This actually makes self-hosted WordPress somewhat easier to hand off in practice, provided the hosting account credentials are documented and accessible — there's no separate platform gatekeeper to negotiate with beyond the host itself.

Web Hosting Accounts: The Piece Everyone Forgets

For self-hosted sites, the hosting account (not WordPress itself) is the actual gatekeeper. Most major hosts follow a broadly similar pattern to what's outlined for domain registrars: contacting support with a death certificate, proof of relationship or estate authority, and account details is typically the starting point, though exact documentation requirements vary by provider. Because hosting bills recur monthly or annually just like domain renewals, an unattended hosting account can lapse and take the entire website offline — sometimes permanently, if backups weren't kept and the host purges data after a grace period.

What Happens to a Business Website or Blog That Generates Income?

If the site generates revenue — through ads, affiliate links, subscriptions, or product sales — it needs the same careful financial handling as any other income-producing asset. Revenue should continue to be tracked and reported as business income during estate administration, and if the site is eventually sold, that can trigger capital gains considerations. This is directly relevant to Rohan-style AdSense and affiliate content sites: the underlying value isn't just the domain, it's the accumulated content, search rankings, and traffic history, none of which transfer automatically just because someone gains access to the hosting account.

How to Set Up Ownership Transfer Now (Before It's Needed)

The single most effective thing you can do, regardless of platform, is add a trusted second person with administrative access before anything happens — most platforms, including Squarespace, require the new owner to already be an existing contributor or administrator before a formal ownership transfer can even be initiated. Waiting until after a death to try to add someone is often impossible, since that requires the very account access that's now in question.

• Squarespace: invite a trusted person as a Contributor with Administrator permissions now — full ownership transfer can be completed with a few clicks once they're already added.
• WordPress.com: add a trusted user as an Administrator on the site.
• Self-hosted WordPress: ensure hosting account credentials (not just the WordPress admin login) are documented and accessible to your executor.

What Happens If You Do Nothing?

Without a pre-designated administrator or documented hosting credentials, a website generally just sits exactly as it was — until a renewal payment fails. At that point, most platforms will eventually suspend and then delete the site after a grace period, permanently losing the content unless a backup exists somewhere else. For any site with real content, traffic, or income history, that's a significant, avoidable loss — the fix takes minutes today, and is often impossible after the fact.

Other Website Builders: Wix, Shopify and Webflow

The Squarespace-versus-WordPress distinction covered above applies in similar form to other popular website builders. Wix, like Squarespace, is a fully hosted platform where the account itself controls the site, and generally requires going through general account-recovery support with proof of death since it doesn't publish as dedicated a process as Squarespace's. Shopify — relevant for anyone running an online store — ties directly into ongoing revenue and customer data, making prompt executor access especially important; Shopify's support process for a deceased store owner typically requires similar documentation (death certificate, proof of estate authority) before granting account access. Webflow follows the same general hosted-platform pattern. Across all of them, the same core principle from this guide applies: add a trusted co-administrator now, before it's needed, since none of them make retroactive access easy.

SEO Value and Why an Abandoned Website Loses Money Fast

For any content-driven or affiliate-monetized website — exactly the kind of AdSense and affiliate sites many independent publishers build — the real value isn't just the domain or the hosting account, it's the accumulated search engine rankings built up over months or years of consistent publishing and technical maintenance. Google's ranking algorithms reward freshness and consistency; a site that goes fully unmaintained (no new content, expired SSL certificates, broken plugin updates, eventual hosting lapse) typically sees rankings and traffic decline within weeks to months, well before the hosting account itself would be formally deleted. This means the practical "use it or lose it" window for a monetized website is often much shorter than the technical account-recovery window — another reason a fast-acting, pre-authorized administrator matters more here than almost any other digital asset in this guide.

A Simple Website Succession Checklist

Bringing this all together, here's a short list worth acting on today rather than treating as someday-planning:

1. Add a trusted person as a Contributor/Administrator on every website platform you use
2. Document your hosting account login separately from your website platform login, if they're different
3. Confirm domain and hosting renewal payments won't simply lapse unnoticed (see our domain names after death guide)
4. Keep an independent backup of your site's content and media files outside the platform itself
5. Note whether the site generates income, and roughly how much, so your executor understands its value to the estate

E-Commerce Sites: Payment Processors and Customer Data

If the website is an online store (Shopify, WooCommerce on WordPress, or Squarespace Commerce), there's an additional layer beyond the site itself: the payment processor account (Stripe, PayPal, Square) that actually handles transactions. These processor accounts are entirely separate from the website platform and have their own account-recovery requirements, typically involving direct contact with the processor's support team, a death certificate, and proof of estate authority before any pending payouts can be released or the account transferred. An executor handling an e-commerce estate needs to address the website, the domain, and the payment processor as three distinct pieces, not one bundled asset.

Customer Data, Privacy Law, and What an Executor Should Know

A business website that has collected customer information — email addresses, order history, saved payment details — carries data privacy obligations that don't simply disappear because the business owner has died. Depending on the site's audience and location, laws like GDPR (EU customers) or CCPA (California customers) may still apply to how that stored customer data is handled, retained, or deleted during a business wind-down or transfer. This is a genuinely specialized area, and any executor handling a customer-data-holding website that's being sold, transferred, or shut down should get specific legal guidance rather than assuming general estate administration knowledge covers it.

Choosing a Platform With Succession in Mind (For New Sites)

If you're setting up a new website and estate continuity is a genuine consideration, it's worth factoring that into your platform choice from the start. Platforms with clearer multi-administrator support and more transparent business-transfer documentation (Squarespace's dedicated deceased-owner process being the clearest example covered in this guide) create meaningfully less friction down the line than platforms where account recovery is handled purely through generic customer support. This doesn't mean choosing a platform based on this factor alone, but for anyone building a site intended to outlast a single person's active involvement — a family business, a content site meant to generate long-term income — it's a legitimate factor alongside the usual considerations of cost, design flexibility, and ease of use.

A Step-by-Step Timeline for Website Succession

Here's a realistic sequence for handling a website after a death, in the order that best preserves value:

1. Immediately: confirm hosting and domain renewal payments won't lapse unexpectedly while other matters are sorted out.
2. Within the first few weeks: if a trusted co-administrator was already added in advance, have them assume day-to-day management. If not, begin the platform's account-recovery process (Squarespace's dedicated form, or general support for WordPress.com/hosting providers) with death certificate and estate authority documentation.
3. Once access is secured: back up all content and media independently of the platform, and review any connected payment processor or e-commerce accounts separately.
4. Ongoing: decide whether the site continues operating, is sold, or is retired — and if income-generating, ensure revenue continues being properly tracked and reported during estate administration.

Selling a Website and Its Content: What Buyers Look For

If an heir decides the best path forward is selling an established website rather than maintaining or retiring it, it helps to understand what actually drives valuation in a website sale (commonly handled through marketplaces like Flippa or Empire Flippers, or through a direct broker for larger sites). Buyers generally price a content or e-commerce site as a multiple of its monthly profit, factoring in traffic stability, search ranking durability, and how dependent the site's income is on the previous owner's personal involvement (a site that runs largely on autopilot, with established SEO and passive affiliate or ad income, is considerably more valuable to a buyer than one that required daily personal management). This is exactly why keeping the site actively maintained during any estate transition period — rather than letting it sit dormant for months while other matters are settled — meaningfully protects its eventual sale value.

Bringing It Together: Websites as Part of a Broader Online Business

For anyone running multiple websites as an ongoing business — the exact situation many independent publishers and affiliate marketers find themselves in — this guide is really one piece of a larger picture that also includes the domains covered in our companion guide, any cloud storage holding source files and backups, and the various third-party tools (analytics, email marketing, ad networks) tied to each site. Treating "the business" as a single documented unit, with one clear list of every domain, hosting account, and connected service, makes succession dramatically more manageable than trying to reconstruct that picture from scratch after the fact — a genuinely worthwhile hour of documentation now, against what could otherwise be months of guesswork later.

A Closing Thought on Digital Publishing as a Lasting Asset

A website built up over months or years of consistent publishing represents something genuinely unusual among digital assets: it's simultaneously a piece of creative and professional work, a functioning small business, and — because of how search rankings compound over time — an asset that often continues generating value passively long after active daily management stops, provided the underlying hosting and domain infrastructure stays intact. That combination is exactly why it deserves more deliberate estate planning attention than it typically receives. Compared to a social media profile that mostly just needs to be memorialized or closed, a website is closer to a small business with real ongoing value — and treating it that way, with proper documentation, backups, and a named plan for its future, is what actually protects that value for whoever inherits it. Whether your site is a hobby blog or a meaningful income stream, the same principle from across this entire guide series holds true here too: platforms rarely solve this problem proactively, so the outcome your family ends up with depends almost entirely on what you documented and set up in advance.