Connecting your domain

Your domain stays registered to you, and its settings stay with whoever looks after them now: the company you bought it from, your IT provider, or an account of your own. Nothing about it moves to us, and your email is not touched. Connecting your new website takes three records in those settings, which you add, or which we add with you if you would rather.

Before anything is planned we ask three things. If you do not know an answer, tell us and we will find out.

1. Who the domain is registered to. It should be you or your business. For a .uk domain the public register at Nominet shows who, and for other endings the company you bought it from does.
2. Who looks after the domain’s settings: the records that send your website and your email where they go. Usually it is the company the domain is registered with, but it can be your old agency or someone else.
3. Where your email is: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or a mail server run by your old agency.

• The domain is registered to your old agency. Getting it into an account in your own name comes first, and nothing else moves until it is there. We will say what to ask them for.
• The settings are with your old agency, and you are leaving them. The settings move to an account in your own name first. We copy every record across before anything changes, so your email and anything else that uses the domain keep working exactly as they were.
• Your email is on a mail server run by your old agency. Your email moves to a provider such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace first, because the agency’s server goes when the agency does. That is a separate piece of work, which we can quote or you can arrange.
• Your email is on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and the domain and its settings are yours. Your website is connected as below, and your email is not affected.

We send you two records to add where your domain’s settings are kept. Each is a name and a value, of the kind called TXT. They prove the domain is yours and let us have your website’s security certificate ready before the day, so the padlock is there for the first visitor. They change nothing else, and they can stay once your site is live.

At a quiet time we agree with you, the record for www changes to point at sites.stillsite.net. It is the kind called CNAME. Your new site takes over as visitors’ devices catch up, usually within minutes, and the old site can then be switched off. If anything is not right, putting the record back as it was brings the old site back just as quickly.

Your domain on its own, without the www, is set to forward to the www address, so both reach your site. Most domain companies have a forwarding setting for this; we tell you where yours is, or set it with you.

We can. The domain stays registered in your name, as Ownership and leaving says, and from then on we look after it for you: its records, its certificate and its renewals.

Most domain endings, .com, .net, .org, .ai and the like, move with a code. Your provider may call it an authorisation code, an auth code, an EPP code or a transfer key: they all mean the same thing.

1. Sign in to your provider and find the domain.
2. If the domain is locked against transfer, which most are by default, unlock it there.
3. Look for Transfer, Transfer away or Authorisation code. Most providers show the code on the page or email it to the address they hold for you.
4. Send us the code. We start the transfer the same day.

A transfer usually adds a year to the domain’s registration, which the company it moves to charges for. Where that or any other charge is made for the transfer, it is passed on to you.

A .co.uk, .uk or .org.uk domain has no code. Instead, ask your provider to change the domain’s IPS tag to the one we give you. Most providers have a page for it, or do it on request. Once they have, the domain is with us, usually within the hour, and there is nothing more for you to do.

For a domain moving with a code, the registered contact, usually you, gets an email asking you to approve the transfer. Press the button in it and the domain moves, usually within five days; some providers release it the same day. We tell you when it has. Before anything moves, we copy every record your domain has, so your email keeps working exactly as it was.

A domain cannot be transferred within 60 days of being registered or of its last transfer. If yours is in that window, your website is connected as above in the meantime, and the transfer follows once the window has passed.