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Moving your website to a new provider without losing Google or your email

24 October 2026 · 7 min read

Most people who want to leave their web provider have wanted to for a while. The site still shows last summer's opening hours. The email asking for a new photo on the services page went unanswered in March, and the one in May came back with an hourly rate. The hosting renews on the credit card every year and nobody can quite say what the money buys.

What usually keeps a business there is the move itself. Owners worry that switching will knock them off Google, break the email, leave the site blank for a week or start an argument about who owns what. Those worries are fair, because every one of them happens when a move is rushed. They're also all preventable.

Find out what's in your name before you tell anyone you're leaving

Your online presence is usually spread across several companies, and the provider you're leaving may hold some of it in their name rather than yours. Check these before the conversation:

• The domain name, the yourbusiness.com.au address itself. Ask your provider in writing who the registrant is and which email address the account sits under. If it's in their company's name, ask them to transfer it to your business now, while the relationship is still friendly.
• The hosting, which is the server your site lives on. Plenty of owners have never had a login to it, and that's normal.
• Your email. It's often Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and sometimes it's bundled into the hosting. Which one you have decides how careful the move needs to be.
• Your Google Business Profile. You should be its owner, with any provider added as a manager.

Then read your contract for what happens to the site when you go. Some providers hand over the files. Others keep the design, because it was built on their own template and that's what you were renting. Either answer is easier to deal with before you've given notice.

Google ranks your old addresses, so they have to keep working

Google ranks pages, one address at a time, and each address has its own history. If your hot water page at yourbusiness.com.au/hot-water has been sitting on the first page for "hot water repairs Moruya" for three years, that address is the thing Google trusts.

Launch a new site where that address now says "page not found", and Google drops it along with the searches it was bringing in. This is the usual way a move costs a business its rankings, and it's entirely avoidable.

Before anything changes, we list every address your current site has, from its own links and sitemap, plus your Search Console data if you can give us access. We record how each page is performing so there's a baseline to measure against. Every old address then gets a permanent redirect (a 301) to the matching new page. The hot water page goes to the new hot water page, and nothing gets dumped on the homepage because it was easier.

We keep each page's subject in its title and main heading, using the words people actually typed to find it, and we keep your business name, address and phone number exactly as they appear on your Google profile. After the switch we test every old address again. On our care plan, at seven days and again at twenty-eight days, we compare your search clicks and positions with the baseline, and we act on any real drop straight away. The redirects stay in place for at least twelve months.

Google's own guidance says to expect some temporary movement during any move while it recrawls the site, and that a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to settle. Nobody can honestly promise you a ranking. A careful move makes sure nothing you've already earned gets thrown away by accident.

Your email doesn't have to move at all

Your website and your email share a name, so they feel like one thing. They run on separate settings. The record that delivers mail to your inbox (the MX record) is a different entry from the one that points visitors at your website.

When we move a site, your email records stay exactly as they are. If your domain's settings have to move to a new DNS host as part of the switch, we copy every email record across first and check it before anything changes over. Nothing is cancelled at your email provider, and once the switch is done we send test messages to make sure mail still arrives.

The case that needs extra care is email that lives inside the old hosting account. Cancel that hosting and the inboxes go with it. We find that out at the start, and we sort out where the email should live before anything is switched off.

There's no blank week in the middle

Your old site stays live and untouched until the new one has passed its checks. At least a day before the switch we shorten how long the internet holds on to your domain's old settings, down to five minutes, so the change spreads quickly. While it spreads, a visitor sees either the old site or the new one.

If something looks wrong after the switch, pointing the domain back at the old host undoes it. That's why we'll ask you to keep paying for the old hosting until we tell you the new site has settled, and we won't delete anything at your old host or your email provider.

What changes when the new provider is us

Plenty of providers do some of this. We put all of it in writing before you sign:

• A fixed price in writing before anything starts, and any change to the scope quoted before it's done.
• A same-business-day reply to any new enquiry, and a response time written into your care plan.
• The domain registered in your name, on your email address, from day one. On final payment the design made for you is yours outright, and you get the site's full source code with it.
• A plain-English guide to your own website at handover, so you know what each part is and what every login is for.
• An optional monthly care plan, quoted alongside the build, covering hosting, security updates, backups and small changes each month.

The sites themselves are built as plain, fast pages with no plugins to update and no database to break. If you're moving off WordPress or another PHP site, our post on moving off WordPress and PHP explains what that means for you in practice.

How you'd leave us, if you ever wanted to

If you felt stuck with your last provider, you should know how you'd leave us before you sign anything.

The care plan has no notice period. You can cancel at any time and you pay to the end of the current billing month. Within 14 days of leaving, you get a full copy of your site and its content, source included, at no charge, along with written confirmation that you already control your own domain and its settings. We do that even if the parting isn't a happy one.

There are two things you should weigh up. While we host your site, the hosting login stays with us, because we're the ones looking after it. And our sites don't come with an editor you log in to and change pages yourself. You send changes to us, and the care plan includes time each month for the small ones. If rewriting your own pages every week matters to you, a site with a built-in editor will suit you better.

Start with what your current site has

Send us your web address and the name of your current provider and we'll tell you what a move would involve for your site, including anything you should get in writing from them first. We reply by email the same business day.