Move your website to us: free migration

It happens more often than you’d think. The person who built your website has stopped answering, retired or closed down, and you’ve no idea who holds the domain or how to change anything. We can help you get back in control, and we’ll be honest about what we can and can’t do.

What we can do

• Find out where things are. We look up which company your domain is registered with, who it’s registered to and where the website and email are hosted, and explain it in plain English.
• Help you move the domain. If the domain is in your name, or your business’s name, you can usually move it to us. For a .co.uk or .uk domain, that’s done by changing the domain’s IPS tag. For a .com, .org or .net, you need the authorisation code (sometimes called an EPP code) from the company it’s registered with. If you can’t get into that account, their support team can usually help once you’ve shown the domain is yours. Our domains page explains transfers in more detail.
• Rebuild the website. We don’t need the old logins to build you a new site. We can work from what’s on your current site and what you tell us, then design and write a new one for £47 a month, with hosting, your domain and 10 changes a month included.
• Keep your email working. Before anything is switched, we check the records your email relies on so messages keep arriving.

What we need from you, or from the domain owner

We can’t take a domain away from whoever it’s registered to. If your designer registered it in their own name, you’ll need their agreement to move it, or you’ll need to go through the registrar’s own process for proving ownership. For .uk domains, Nominet, which runs the .uk register, has its own process too. These steps can take time, and we can’t promise how they’ll turn out, but we’ll tell you what to ask for and help you through it.

If the domain can’t be recovered, you still have options. We can register a new domain in your name and build the new site on that, so you’re never in this position again.