Keeping Your Domain When You Move Website Builders

People describe changing website builder as "moving the site". The phrase quietly bundles together three things that are contractually and technically unrelated: a software subscription, a domain registration, and a mailbox. They have different expiry dates, different suppliers and different rules, and the only one that genuinely cannot be replaced is the domain.

This card is about that one. Not how to rebuild the pages — about how to make sure that whatever else happens, the name comes with you.

Three subscriptions wearing one invoice

Open the billing screen of any builder that sold you a plan with a domain and you will typically find separate line items with separate renewal dates: the plan, the domain, and the mailbox if you bought one. They arrived together, which is why people assume they behave together. They do not.

Cancelling the plan does not cancel the domain registration, and cancelling the domain registration does not cancel the mailbox. Each stops on its own schedule. That is mostly good news — it means the name does not evaporate the moment you stop paying for the editor — but it also means each one needs a decision of its own, and an unmade decision is a decision to let something lapse.

Write the three dates down before you change anything. They are the spine of the whole exercise.

Secure the name before you touch the website

The order that goes wrong looks like this: build the new site, get excited, cancel the old plan, then discover the domain cannot be moved for another seven weeks.

The order that works puts the registration first, since it is the one component with a compulsory delay written into policy.

Under ICANN's Transfer Policy, a registrar may refuse a transfer requested within sixty days of the domain's creation date, within sixty days of a previous transfer, or within sixty days of a Change of Registrant where the holder did not opt out of the lock beforehand. None of those can be waived by anybody. If you are inside one of them, the name is staying where it is this month whatever you decide about your website.

So step one is not a website step at all. Look up the creation date on the registration record, confirm you are outside all three windows, and only then start planning. If you are inside one, that is your timeline and everything else fits around it.

The contact record trap

There is a particular way to lose two months, and it is almost always well-intentioned.

Somebody decides to do this properly. They open the domain settings, notice the registrant contact is an old address, and correct it. That correction is a Change of Registrant, and unless the opt-out was exercised before the change, a sixty-day transfer lock can follow it.

If both the contact record and the registrar need fixing, do the transfer first and correct the details at the new registrar afterwards — provided the existing contact address still works well enough to receive the authorisation code. If it does not, you have no choice but to fix the record and wait out the lock. Either way, find out which situation you are in before you start, not after.

What to do with the registration

Three options, in increasing order of independence.

Leave it where it is. Perfectly viable if the registration is in your name, the renewal price is acceptable and you are content to keep a billing relationship with a company whose software you have stopped using. Many people do this for years without trouble.

Move it to an independent registrar. The name then sits with a company whose only job is holding it. This is the option that makes every future platform change a small event, and it is what this desk recommends for anyone who expects to outlive their current builder. Namecheap, Dynadot and IONOS are all ordinary places for a name to live.

Move it to the new builder. Tidy, and it recreates exactly the situation you are in now with a different logo on it. Fine if you are certain; worth a pause if the reason you are moving is that you were not certain last time.

Whichever you choose, do it as a deliberate step rather than as a side effect of cancelling something.

Do not cancel anything yet

The single most expensive mistake in this whole area is cancelling the old plan early to save a month's subscription.

While the old plan is running, the old site is up, the old DNS is being answered and the old mailbox is accepting mail. That is not a cost, it is a safety net, and it costs one month of a subscription you have already been paying for years.

Let the old plan run until the name is at its destination registrar, the DNS records are recreated and verified where they now live, and mail has been observed arriving through the new arrangement. Then cancel. The sequence and the reasons are in cancel the plan, keep the name.

The mailbox is its own problem

Of the three subscriptions, the mailbox is the one people forget and the one whose failure is hardest to notice, because a mailbox that has stopped accepting mail looks identical from your side to a quiet week.

It is a large enough subject to have its own card: email on a moving domain covers what to keep running, in what order, and what the notice periods actually are.

A sequence that holds together

1. Write down the three renewal dates: plan, domain, mailbox.
2. Read the registration record. Confirm the registrant contact email is one you can open, and note the creation date.
3. Confirm you are outside all three sixty-day windows. If not, that is your start date.
4. Decide where the registration should live afterwards, and do that move first.
5. Recreate the DNS records wherever the zone is going to live, and verify mail is still flowing.
6. Build, launch and check the new site.
7. Only now, cancel the old plan.

Nothing in that list is difficult. It is simply in an order that most people discover by getting it wrong once.

If you are at the earlier stage — still choosing, and being offered a domain as part of a plan — the terms each provider publishes about what it registers and what happens in year two are on free domain website builder plans. Reading it before signing is considerably cheaper than reading it while leaving.