How to Move Your Website to Another Provider Without Losing Your Business
You open your own website and think what you have been thinking for six months: time to change this. Your provider answers emails a week late, a price-list tweak costs a hundred and fifty and sits in a queue for a fortnight, while the invoice for „care” turns up on the dot every month. You already have someone else in mind. And then comes the thought that stops half of all business owners right here: what if I lose the domain, the copy and everything the site spent three years earning in Google?
That fear is well founded but badly aimed. A website move rarely fails on the technical side. It goes wrong when someone cancels the contract on a Monday while holding neither access to the domain nor a copy of the content. What follows is the order in which nothing goes missing: what to check, what to collect, when to give notice, and how to do it so the site does not vanish for a week.
Step zero: check whose name the domain is registered in
Before you write a single sentence about leaving, open your registrar’s WHOIS lookup and type in your address. The field you want is the registrant, the legal owner.
There are three possible answers. You see your own company details, which puts you in a comfortable position: the domain is yours and the provider merely administers it. You see the provider’s company details, which is an alarm bell, because technically they own the address your customers know you by. Or you see a notice that the data is hidden for privacy reasons, which is normal for sole traders and individuals. In that case ask the registrar to confirm the registrant on the basis of your invoice.
The result decides everything else. If the domain is yours, the move is logistics. If it is not, negotiation comes first. I wrote more about owning your address in the piece on how to choose a domain name.
What is genuinely yours, and what only looks like it
Business owners tend to assume that paying for something means owning all of it. The split is less obvious than that, and it pays to know it before the conversation.
| Item | Who should own it | Where to check |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | You, as the registrant | Registrar’s WHOIS |
| Copy and photos commissioned from the provider | depends on the contract | contract wording or invoice |
| Site code and theme | the provider or the theme author | theme licence |
| Analytics and Search Console | you, as an administrator | permission settings |
| Google Business Profile | you | Business Profile owners section |
| Mailboxes and their contents | you | mail configuration |
| Hosting and server | the provider, and that is fine | invoice |
Two rows in that table cause most of the arguments. Rights to the copy: if the contract says nothing about transferring them, the provider may treat the text they wrote as theirs. The theme: a ready-made template bought on a single-site licence does not travel with you to the next company. Both problems usually get solved the same way, by writing fresh content for the new site, which tends to improve it anyway.
Collect this before you give notice
A working relationship is a much better moment to ask for access than a cancelled one. There is no trick in that, only sequence: you gather your things first, then you announce the decision.
- The domain transfer code (auth code) from your registrar, or written confirmation that the domain is registered to you.
- A full copy of the site: files, a database export, or a ZIP of the sources.
- Original photos and your logo in source quality.
- A list of every page address, which is simply your sitemap (
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). - Administrator rights in Analytics and Search Console assigned to your personal email address, not to a mailbox on the company domain.
- Owner status on your Google Business Profile moved to your account.
- A screenshot of the entire DNS zone, mail records included.
- A copy of your mail, if the mailboxes sit with the provider.
The list looks long, but collecting it takes one afternoon. Without it, the move stretches into a month of emailing someone who has lost every reason to help you.
The order in which nothing disappears
One rule governs the whole thing: the old site keeps working until the last moment, and the switch happens only once the new one is finished and checked.
- Check WHOIS and gather everything on the list above.
- Build the new site on a temporary address and review it calmly, on a phone too.
- Write down the old DNS zone, especially MX, SPF, DKIM and any verification records.
- Lower the TTL to 300 seconds a day before the switch so the change propagates faster.
- Point the A and CNAME records at the new server. Leave mail alone at this stage.
- Wait 24 to 48 hours, check the site from several devices, test the contact form.
- Only now cancel the old contract, respecting whatever notice period it carries.
Step seven can cost you (you will pay for a month or two of something you no longer use) and it is worth every penny. A few hundred is cheap next to a site going dark mid-season because the notice period ran out before the new version was ready.
Redirects and your Google rankings
This is where the myths pile up, so let us simplify. If the new site keeps the same page addresses as the old one (/services/, /contact/), Google will barely register the move: the crawler finds familiar addresses with new content and updates its copy. Rankings often do not budge at all.
If the addresses change, every old one needs a 301 redirect pointing at its new equivalent. That is the permanent kind of redirect, the one that passes on the link value you have built up. Without it, links collected over years lead nowhere and Google shows an error page instead of your offer for weeks. Ask the new provider for the redirect map and check three addresses in it yourself: the home page, your busiest service page and contact.
A realistic horizon: with addresses kept, usually nothing happens; with addresses changed and proper redirects, expect wobble for two to six weeks; with no redirects at all, the drops drag on for months. Once you have switched, submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
Email on the domain, where this usually falls apart
The story repeats itself word for word. Someone moves the site, everything works, and three days later a customer rings to ask why their quote bounced. The reason is nearly always the same: when the name servers changed, someone copied the website records across and forgot the mail ones.
MX records send your mail to whoever hosts your mailboxes, while SPF, DKIM and DMARC decide whether your messages land in the inbox or in spam. They live in the same DNS zone as the site, so they travel with it. Screenshot the whole zone and copy it across record by record. If the mailboxes sat with the old provider, moving email is a separate project to finish before the site. I covered it in the post on business email on your own domain.
What to do when the provider will not hand things over
It happens, and it usually has one of two causes: unpaid invoices, or a domain registered in the provider’s name. The first is solved by a bank transfer, even a grudging one. The second is harder, because a registrant stays the registrant even when you were the one paying for the address all along.
Start with a calm written request to transfer the registration, attaching the invoices that show who funded the address. That is normally enough, because a tug of war benefits nobody. If it is not, work out what the domain is really worth to you: for a local business, starting on a new address costs a few months of work on visibility, but when the address is printed on your van and your stamp the arithmetic looks different and the matter is worth handing to a solicitor.
How to protect yourself when ordering the next site
This whole puzzle comes from one thing: a website somebody else holds. So on your next order, ask three questions before you pay. Whose name is the domain registered in. Whether you can download the complete sources at any moment. What exactly happens to the domain, the files and the mail on the day you decide to leave.
At Sitario the answers go like this. The domain is registered in your details from day one, including when you buy it through our order form. You can download the site’s sources from the panel whenever you like, without asking anyone’s permission. If you delete the site, the DNS zone with its mail records keeps running for another 30 days and you can download the ZIP for that same period, so you get a calm window to move rather than a day of panic. The site itself is a one-off PLN 249 with the first year of hosting, and renewal from year two is PLN 149 a year.
When this is not the right address for you. If you are leaving your provider because you need a shop with stock control, bookings with payments, or an integration with your own software, the done-for-you model will not serve you. The same applies if you want your old site moved across one to one, because we build a new site from your information rather than copying the previous one.
A short recap
Moving a website to another provider is a week’s work and it usually ends well. Check WHOIS, gather your access while the relationship is still running, switch DNS only once the new site is ready, and handle the mail records as their own job. Leave the cancellation until last.
If somewhere along the way you realise you are not sure what those invoices actually pay for, have a look at the piece where I take hosting, domains, SSL and DNS apart. And if it turns out the problem is not the provider but the site itself, check first when to redesign your business website.