October 8, 2026 Maintenance By Edwin Lynch

The email usually arrives on an otherwise ordinary day. Your web developer is retiring, moving out of web work, or closing down the hosting side of their business. Your website (and quite possibly your email) needs a new home, and you’ve got 30 days.

First, the good news: a developer who gives you a month’s notice is doing it properly, and 30 days is plenty of time. It only becomes not enough if the first week is spent hoping it’ll sort itself out.

Think of it like your landlord selling the building. Your business isn’t going anywhere, but before the new owner changes the locks you need to know three things:

whose name is on the lease
who has the keys, and
where your mail gets delivered.

For a website, that’s your domain name, your logins and your DNS. Here’s what to check, in the order I’d check it.

The short version

Confirm your domain name is registered to your business, not your developer.
Take a full backup of the website today, and store it somewhere other than the server that’s closing.
Get your own access to the domain, DNS, hosting and WordPress.
Find out where your email actually lives before anyone changes anything.
List every paid theme, plugin and service, and whose account each one is on.
Make sure your business owns the accounts around the website, especially the Google ones.
Put one person in charge, and don’t let the old account close until the new one is tested.

1. Find out whose name is on your domain

Your domain name (yourbusiness.com.au) is the most important item on this list. A website can be rebuilt. Email can be moved. A domain registered to the wrong business is the slow problem, so it goes first.

Check it today with auDA’s free .au WHOIS lookup (as in “who is”). Type in your domain and look for three things:

Registrant: the business that holds the domain. It should be yours, with your ABN or ACN.
Registrar: the company it’s registered through. You’ll need your own login there, or the domain moved to an account you control.
Name servers: where your DNS is managed (more on that shortly). If they point to your developer’s hosting, that’s the account that’s closing.

Strictly speaking, you don’t own a .au domain; you hold a licence to use it. (auDA is quite particular about this.) The point stands: the licence should be in your business’s name. If it’s in your developer’s name instead, raise it in your very first reply. Moving it into your name needs their sign-off and goes through the registrar, so it’s not a week-four job.

The lookup won’t show everything, so ask the registrar or your developer for two more things:

the renewal date, and
the domain password (also called a transfer or auth code)

You’ll need these if the domain moves to a different registrar. And make sure the registrant contact email is an address in your business that someone actually reads. That’s where renewal notices go. A domain that quietly expires mid-handover, because the reminders went to an inbox nobody checks, is the most avoidable disaster on this list.

2. Take a full backup today, and keep it somewhere else

Before anything else gets touched, get a complete copy of the website. Complete means two parts:

the files: themes, plugins, and every image and document you’ve ever uploaded
the database: your pages, posts, settings and form entries.

One without the other is half a website.

For WordPress migrations, we use (the free version) of UpdraftPlus to do this. Updraft is a WordPress plugin (we write custom WP Plugins here at Geoffrey) that makes it easy to resurrect a copied WP site into a new domain.

Store the backup somewhere other than the hosting account that’s closing. Backups are often kept on the same server by default, which is a bit like keeping your spare key under the doormat of a house that’s about to be demolished. Google Drive, Dropbox or a USB stick in your desk drawer all beat that.

Ask your developer for a backup too. Theirs will probably be more complete than anything you can make yourself, and two copies in two places is the whole idea.

3. Get the keys: domain, DNS, hosting and WordPress

You need access to four things, in your own hands rather than on a sticky note on somebody else’s monitor:

the domain registrar (from step 1)
your DNS, which is the address book for your domain. It tells the internet “the website is over here, the email is over there”.
the hosting account, at least until the site has moved
a WordPress administrator account in your own name, with your own email address.

On that last one: if the only administrator account belongs to your developer, every password reset goes to their inbox. Once the handover’s done, remove their account or downgrade it. That’s not a comment on anyone’s honesty. It’s just tidy security.

Now the catch. DNS is very often managed inside the same hosting account that’s being closed. When the account goes, the address book goes with it. Your website disappears, and so does your email, even if your email has nothing to do with that server.

Which brings us to the big one.

4. Work out where your email lives before anyone touches anything

Read this section twice.

Email is where website moves most often go wrong, mostly because nobody realises email is involved until it stops.

Your business email will be living in one of three places.

Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace

You sign in to Outlook (Microsoft) or Gmail (Google) using your business email address. Your mailboxes are safe: closing the hosting account won’t delete them. But they still rely on a handful of DNS records to receive mail, and to prove that the mail you send is genuinely yours. If those records lived on the old account and aren’t copied across exactly, your inbox goes quiet. Nothing gets deleted. Nothing new gets in, either.

On your developer’s server

Likely if you read your mail through a webmail page on your own domain, or your mail app’s settings mention something like mail.yourbusiness.com.au. These mailboxes are deleted when the account closes, along with everything in them. They need to be moved before that happens, usually to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, or to a new host that offers mailboxes.

Forwarding only

Mail sent to your business address is forwarded on to a personal Gmail or internet-provider address. The forwarding rule lives on the server, and it closes with the server.

Not sure which one you’ve got? Ask: “Where is our email hosted, and where is our DNS managed?” Any developer can answer that in a sentence.

There’s one more email nobody thinks about: the one your website sends you. When someone fills in your contact form, the site emails you the enquiry, and that email often goes through a sending service set up on your developer’s account, backed by those same DNS records. (I explained how that works, and how it fails silently, in Should You Let AI Build Your Website?) Cancel the service or lose the records and your form still says “Thanks, we’ll be in touch!” while the enquiry goes nowhere.

So, two rules. Before the old account closes, someone saves a copy of every DNS record (a screenshot is fine). After the move, someone sends test emails in and out, and fills in every form on the site to check the enquiries actually arrive. Ideally the same someone.

5. List every paid theme and plugin, and whose licence it’s on

Most WordPress sites rely on a few paid add-ons: a premium theme or page builder, a forms plugin, a backup or security tool. These are often bought on the developer’s own licence, which made perfect sense while they were looking after your site. In our case, we have perpectual license for a slew of popular WordPress themes (e.g. Astra, Divi etc.) and developer licenses for WordFence Security and Gravity Forms (the cost of which is covered by our Hosting, Security & Maintenance Plans). When your developer leaves, those licences quietly lapse.

Nothing dramatic happens on day one. The site keeps working. It just stops receiving updates, including security fixes, and that’s how a healthy WordPress website becomes an easy target six months later.

Ask for a list of every paid theme, plugin and service on the site, whose account each licence is on, and when it renews. Then decide, one by one:

buy your own
have your new developer cover it, or
replace it with something else.

Sorting this out now beats finding out via a “your licence has expired” banner in your dashboard.

6. Check who owns the accounts around your website

Your website rarely lives on its own. Check that your business, not your developer, is the owner of:

your Google Business Profile
Google Search Console and Google Analytics
any payment gateway or booking system connected to the site
anything else with a login and a subscription: fonts, stock images, a mailing list, a security or speed service.

These are often set up under your developer’s own Google account, with you added as a user, or not added at all. Ask them to make you an owner before they go. Some can be reclaimed later with enough patience. Years of Analytics history usually can’t.

7. Put one person in charge of the move

A website move usually involves your outgoing developer, whoever’s taking over, possibly your IT or email person, and you. Everyone handles their own bit well. The DNS sits in the gap between all of them and belongs to nobody. Guess where things go wrong.

So choose one coordinator. It can be you, your new developer or your IT person, but it has to be one name, and everyone has to know whose. Their job:

Set a switch-over date. Not a Friday afternoon, and not day 30. DNS changes can take a day or two to reach everyone.
Freeze content edits a day or two beforehand, so nothing gets lost mid-move.
Move the site and test it at its new home before the domain is pointed at it.
Switch the DNS, then test the website, every form, and email in both directions.
Keep the old account open until everything checks out. A few extra days of the old hosting is the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.

If you’d rather that person was me, that’s what my Hosting & Maintenance Plans are for. When you pay for a year of hosting in advance, moving your site is included. I copy your DNS records across, move and test the site, and check that your forms and email still arrive once it’s live. Your mailboxes usually stay where they are (usually with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) and in some cases I can host them on the new server (which is free, not yet-another-$30-per-month).

Your 30 days, week by week

Week 1: find out what you’ve got. Run the WHOIS lookup, get the renewal date, find out where your email and DNS live, get a backup in hand, and ask for the list of paid add-ons.
Week 2: decide where it’s all going. Choose a new home and a coordinator. Collect your logins, the domain password and owner access to your accounts.
Week 3: move it. Set the site up at its new home and test it there, before anything is switched.
Week 4: switch and check. Change the DNS early in the week, test the site, forms and email, then let the old account close.

The email to send your developer today

Most developers on their way out are glad to help and want to leave things tidy. Make it easy for them. Copy, paste and adjust:

Hi [name],

Thanks for the notice, and for looking after the site. To make the handover smooth, could you please send me:

who the domain is registered to, the registrar, the renewal date and the domain password

where our DNS is managed, plus a copy of all current DNS records

where our email is hosted

a full backup of the website (files and database)

access to the hosting account, and a WordPress administrator login in my name

a list of paid themes, plugins and services, whose account each is on, and when each renews

owner access to our Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics

the date the hosting account will close.

Thanks again,

[your name]

The honest part

Most handovers are uneventful. The ones that go badly almost never fail on anything difficult. They fail on one small thing nobody owned, found on day 29: a domain in the wrong name, DNS records that vanished with the old account, a contact form quietly sending enquiries nowhere.

And sometimes the best move isn’t a move. If your site is several years old, a change of hosting is also a natural moment to ask whether it still does its job, or whether it’s time for something new. I wrote about when updating an older website is worth it, and when it isn’t. Either way, don’t let that decision hold up the domain, DNS, email and backup steps. Those happen regardless.

Not sure what you’ve got, or where it lives? Send me your website address and I’ll tell you, free, where your domain, DNS and email currently sit, and whose name the domain is in. It takes me a few minutes, it’s the first thing you need to know, and you’ll get a straight answer from the person who’d actually do the work.

Would you rather hand the whole move over? See my Hosting & Maintenance plans. Moving your site is included when you pay for a year in advance.

Good luck! 🙂