How to Switch Website Providers Without Going Dark

Changing who hosts or builds your website has a reputation for going wrong, and the reputation is mostly earned. Sites go dark for days. Email stops arriving and nobody notices until a customer rings to ask why they were ignored. Rankings drop and never fully come back.

Almost all of it comes from doing the steps in the wrong order. There is a sequence where nothing is ever offline, because the old site keeps working right up to the moment the new one takes over. This is that sequence.

Before anything else: get control of the domain

The domain is the address, and it is what you are actually moving. Everything else is a copy job.

So the first task is not technical. It is confirming that you can sign in to the registrar yourself, with an account in your own name, and change where the domain points. If you cannot, the whole switch is blocked until that is fixed, and the fixing is a conversation rather than a task. Who owns your website walks through how to check and how to ask.

Do not start the rest of this until that is settled. A rebuild you cannot point the address at is an expensive way to learn a lesson.

Step one: take a full copy of what you have

Do this while the old site is still up and while relations with the current provider are still good.

Save every page as text, so nothing is rewritten from memory. Collect the photographs at the largest size available, particularly anything of your own crew, trucks and finished jobs, because those are the parts that cannot be recreated. Export any form submissions or enquiries the old site is holding. And write down every page address the site currently has, because you will need that list later and it is much harder to reconstruct after the site is gone.

An easy way to get the address list is to look at the site's own sitemap file, usually at your address followed by /sitemap.xml, and save what it lists.

Step two: work out where your email lives

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that causes the real damage.

Look at your email settings, or ask whoever set it up: is the email provided by the same company that hosts the website, or by a separate service such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?

If it is separate, a website move does not touch it, provided you leave its DNS records alone when you change where the website points. Note down those records before you change anything.

If email comes with the hosting, then cancelling the hosting cancels the email, and that has to be planned as its own move with its own timing. Mailboxes have to be created on the new service and existing mail copied across before the switch, not after.

A website being offline for an afternoon is an inconvenience. Email failing silently for a week is lost work you never find out about.

Step three: build the replacement on a temporary address

The new site gets built and finished somewhere else entirely, on whatever temporary address the new host gives you. Nothing about your live site changes while this happens.

Two rules make the switch invisible to search engines.

Keep the page addresses the same where you sensibly can. If your service page is currently at /drain-cleaning, the new one should be at /drain-cleaning. Every path you keep is a redirect you do not have to write and a ranking you do not have to defend.

Keep the text. Rebuilds have a habit of trimming pages down to something cleaner and shorter, and then the traffic goes with the words. Redesign the layout freely. Do not quietly delete the content.

Then check the new site properly before it goes anywhere near your domain. Every page loads, every phone number is a working link on a phone, the contact form actually delivers to an inbox somebody reads, and the whole thing behaves on a phone screen rather than only on a desktop. Most local service traffic is on a phone, so a desktop-only check is not a check.

Step four: write the redirects for anything that moved

For any old page address that does not exist on the new site, set up a permanent redirect to the closest equivalent page. That is what the address list from step one was for.

Sending everything to the homepage instead is the common shortcut and it is a bad trade. A visitor who clicked a link about emergency callouts and lands on a homepage usually leaves, and search engines treat a blanket redirect to the homepage as roughly equivalent to deleting the page.

Step five: switch the DNS

Now, and only now, you change where the domain points.

Sign in to the registrar, open the DNS settings, and change the records that point at the website so they point at the new host. The new host will tell you exactly what to put there.

Leave the mail records alone unless email is part of this move. If you are unsure which is which, take a screenshot of the whole DNS screen before you change a single line. That screenshot has rescued a lot of afternoons.

The change usually takes effect within an hour or two, though it can take up to a day to reach everybody. During that window some visitors see the new site and some see the old one, which is harmless as long as both are still up. That is precisely why the old provider is not cancelled yet.

Step six: watch for a couple of days

Load the site on your own phone, off your office wifi, so you are seeing what a customer sees rather than something cached.

Send a real enquiry through the contact form and confirm it arrives. Send yourself an email from an outside address and confirm that arrives too. Check a handful of the old page addresses from your list and confirm they land somewhere sensible.

If you use Google Search Console, look at it after a few days for a jump in errors. A small wobble in rankings for a week or two after a move is normal and settles. A cliff is a symptom, and it is almost always a redirect that was missed or a page that quietly did not come across.

Step seven: cancel the old provider

Only now, once the new site has been live and correct for a few days and the email is confirmed working.

Cancel in writing, ask for confirmation, and check your card statement the following month to make sure the charge actually stopped. Keep your copy of the old site somewhere safe rather than deleting it. It weighs nothing and it is the only insurance you have.

What this looks like on a small business site

For a typical service business site of five to ten pages, the build is the timeline and everything else is an afternoon. If you are choosing what to move to, the honest range of options and what each really costs is in what a small business website costs, and the difference between renting the software your site runs on and owning the files is in Wix versus owning your website.

One last piece of advice that has nothing to do with the mechanics. A switch is the natural moment to fix the reasons the old site was not producing calls, because you are touching every page anyway. If you carry the same structure across to a new host, you get the same results on a different invoice. Why your website is not getting calls is the checklist worth reading first, and our free site check will read your current page and list what is missing in about a minute, with no email address asked for and nothing stored.

Get the domain in your own name, build before you switch, and cancel last. Do those three and the rest is admin.