How to move your website to a new vendor without losing anything

This comes up in about a third of audits. The site was built years ago by somebody who has since moved on, closed the agency, or simply stopped replying. Before anybody rebuilds anything, you need to establish what you actually control.

The six things to get hold of

• The domain registration. The most urgent one. Log into the registrar and check that the registrant is your company and not your vendor personally. If it renews on their card, you do not own your own address.
• DNS control. Separate from the domain. Whoever controls DNS controls where your website and, critically, your email go. Losing this is the one failure that can take your business offline rather than just your website.
• Hosting access. Where the files live and who pays for it. Get the control panel login rather than a promise that they will hand things over.
• The files themselves. A copy of the site. Even if you are replacing it, you need the content, the images and the URL structure so a rebuild does not lose your search position.
• Analytics. If any exists, the account should be owned by an email address at your company. Years of traffic history is worth keeping and it is trivial to lose.
• Anything with a licence. Themes, plugins, stock photography. Know what is licensed to whom before you assume you can keep using it.

If the vendor will not cooperate

It happens, usually not out of malice but because the person has moved on and does not want the work. You are not stuck.

The domain can be recovered through the registrar with proof that the company owns it, though it takes paperwork and time. The site content can be recovered from search engine caches and web archives. Hosting can be replaced entirely. What you cannot recover is analytics history and anything licensed to them personally, so ask for those first.

Protecting the search position you already have

The most common own goal in a rebuild is launching with a new URL structure and no redirects. Every page that ranked now returns an error, and the position built over a decade disappears in a fortnight.

Before anybody switches anything, get a list of every existing URL and where it should now point. Any competent vendor will do this without being asked. Ask anyway, because the ones who do not will not tell you until it is too late.

The handover to insist on next time

Write it into the engagement at the start rather than discovering it at the end. Domain and DNS in your company's name. Hosting in your company's account. Analytics owned by your email address. A copy of the files on handover. And a named person who answers.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.