Of the 88 businesses I surveyed earlier this month, sixteen had no working web address while still visibly trading. I had half expected to find abandoned businesses. Mostly I found the opposite: busy firms, active social pages, recent reviews, and a domain that had quietly stopped resolving.
Almost none of it was dramatic. A renewal did not go through, and nothing arrived to say so in a way anybody noticed.
How a domain gets away from you
A domain name is rented, not bought, in one or two year blocks. Renewal is normally automatic, which is the reason it fails silently — the failure is the absence of a routine event rather than an event in itself.
The usual causes are all mundane:
- The card on file expired. The renewal attempt failed, the retry failed, and both notices went to email.
- The notices went somewhere nobody reads. Often an address from when the website was first built — a personal account, a former employee, or the web designer who set it up years ago.
- The registrar changed hands. Accounts get migrated, and renewal settings do not always survive the move intact.
- Somebody else holds it. A developer or agency registered it in their own name as a convenience at the time. When the relationship ended, the renewal reminder stayed with them.
The question worth answering today is not "is my domain fine" but "which inbox would tell me if it were not". If you cannot name that address, that is the thing to fix, and it takes ten minutes.
What actually stops working
The website going offline is the visible part, and it is usually not the expensive part.
Email stops too. If your email runs on your own domain — anything that is not a gmail.com or outlook.com address — it depends on the same domain name. When the domain lapses, mail sent to you stops arriving, and in most cases the sender gets a bounce message that reads like the address does not exist. Quotes, enquiries, invoices and replies all fail at once, and you find out from whoever eventually rings up.
Links from elsewhere stop working. Directory entries, your Google Business Profile, social profiles, old quotes, the sign on the van and anything anyone has ever bookmarked all point at an address that no longer answers.
Search listings decay. Search engines will keep the pages for a while, then drop them as the crawl repeatedly fails. Recovering ranking afterwards takes longer than recovering the domain.
The stages after expiry, and why speed matters
Exactly what happens next depends on which registry your domain belongs to — a .uk name and a .com name run on different rules — and on your registrar's own policy on top. The shape is broadly the same though, and it runs in three stages.
- A grace period. The domain stops working but is still yours, and you can renew at the normal price. This is the window you want to be in.
- A redemption period. Still recoverable, but now as a formal restore, and registrars generally charge a substantial fee for it — often many times the renewal price.
- Release. The name goes back on the open market and anyone can register it. At that point it is no longer a question of paying a fee.
The lengths vary, so do not take a number from an article as gospel, including this one. Log in to your registrar and look at what it says about your particular domain. The one general rule that holds everywhere is that every stage is cheaper and simpler than the one after it.
If you discover a lapsed domain, treat it as urgent rather than as an admin job for next week. The difference between acting on the day and acting a month later can be the difference between a renewal fee and losing the name.
The ten-minute check
Worth doing once, properly, and then leaving alone.
- Find out who your registrar is — the company you pay for the domain, which may not be the same as whoever built the website or hosts it. A public WHOIS lookup will tell you if you genuinely do not know.
- Make sure you can log in. Not your developer, you. If only somebody else can, that is worth resolving while the relationship is a good one.
- Check the registrant name. The registrant is the legal holder. It should be your business, not an individual who once helped out and not a third-party company.
- Check the contact email is one you read, and preferably not one that depends on the domain itself. If the domain lapses, mail to that address lapses with it.
- Turn auto-renew on and check the payment card is current. Diarise a card expiry check annually.
- Put the renewal date in your calendar with a reminder a month before, independently of the registrar. This is the belt to the registrar's braces.
- Consider renewing further out. Multi-year renewal is inexpensive and removes several opportunities for this to go wrong.
While you are in there
Two related things are worth the same visit. Check whether your domain has a registrar lock enabled, which prevents it being transferred away without your say-so; most registrars turn this on by default and it is worth confirming. And check that your website loads on https rather than plain http, because the certificate that provides it also expires on a schedule and produces a browser warning when it does — a different failure with a similar cause.
Why I bother writing about this
It is unglamorous, and it is the highest-consequence item on any website maintenance list. Everything else on that list makes a working website better. This is the one that decides whether there is a website at all, and it fails without a single visible warning on the website itself.
The sixteen businesses I found were not careless. Their web address had simply become something nobody was responsible for, which is a very easy state for a domain to reach and a hard one to notice from the inside.
The full survey, with the anonymised dataset, is in the write-up here. For the related question of your business details drifting apart across the places they appear, there is keeping your business details consistent everywhere.