The nature of a website is to be tangible. I mean it is code, media and text and it is saved to a disk and made available publicly. As soon as the file is saved it is considered copyrighted
The copyright notice most of us put at the bottom of our pages visibly proclaims all the site or page's material and contents cannot be used without permission of the owner. It does not matter if the person or organization copying the contents sees the notice or not. In 1989 a public notice requirement was eliminated.
It gets tricky if you ever want to file an infringement lawsuit. You must officially register the website with the copyright office first. This requires a $35 online registration fee.
You must also make a content 'deposit'. A deposit is the actual web site, as I interpret it, as it renders in the browser. You can upload the content to the copyright office.
What makes it complicated is any updates to the site require a new deposit and registration fee. I think this makes it difficult because most web sites update content frequently. I try to add 5-10 new articles on Love2Dev and I update 10-20 articles each month. I don't have the money or time to continuously register with the copyright office.
Circulars, newsletters and databases are excluded from this requirement since they are considered to be an ongoing creation.
Website copyright rules are covered in detail in the Copyright Office's Circular 66. The first couple of sentences gave me pause as I was researching for this article:
The Copyright Act does not explicitly recognize websites as a type of copyrightable subject matter. However, you may be able to register a website or a specific web page if it satisfies certain statutory requirements
That may seem like everything I have shared to this point is wrong. But it’s not.
What the Copyright Office won't let you copyright is the website, which they refer to as the code, at least that is what I interpret. What you can copyright is the content, media and other original creative work contained in the website.
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