The SiteRoot team6 min read
You already own the address. Maybe you bought it years ago for a site that never happened, maybe it points at a one-page holding page a cousin built in 2019, maybe it is currently doing nothing at all. Now you have a new website and you need the address to point at it.
The short answer: you do not buy the domain again, and you do not move it anywhere. You log in to the company you rent the name from, change one or two settings so the name points at the new site, and wait somewhere between a few minutes and a day for the change to spread. Nothing is lost and nothing is transferred.
The one thing that can genuinely go wrong is your business email, and it goes wrong in a specific way that is easy to avoid if you read the next few sections before you touch anything.
What "connecting" actually means
Two separate things get muddled here, and keeping them apart makes the rest simple.
The registrar is the company you rent the name from and pay once a year. It might be GoDaddy, VentraIP, Crazy Domains, Netregistry, Cloudflare, whoever billed you. They hold the licence to the name.
The records are the entries that say where to send people who type your address. One entry sends web visitors to your website. A different entry sends email to your mail provider. They are independent of each other, which is the crucial part: you can move your website without moving your email, as long as you only change the web entry.
Connecting a domain to a new site means editing the web entry and leaving the mail entry alone.
The two ways to do it, and which to pick
Point the records. You keep your current setup and edit only the entries that concern the website: usually one for the bare address and one for the www version. Everything else on the domain, email included, stays exactly where it is.
Hand over the name servers. You point the whole domain at the new host, which then controls every entry on it. Fewer steps, which is why most guides suggest it.
Pick the first one if there is email on your domain. If anyone in the business has an address ending in your domain name, changing name servers moves the mail entries too, and unless the new host has the right ones set up, your email stops arriving. It does not bounce loudly. It just quietly goes nowhere while you assume it is a slow morning.
Pick the second one if you are certain nothing but the website uses the domain, or if you have written down your mail entries and can put them back.
Write down four things before you change anything
Five minutes now, versus a bad afternoon later.
- Which registrar holds it. If you genuinely do not know, a public whois lookup for your domain will name them. Failing that, search your email for a renewal invoice.
- Who can log in. The account and the email address attached to it. If that email is an old provider you no longer have, sort that out first, because every recovery step goes through it.
- Where your email is handled. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, your host's own mail, or nothing at all. Before you edit a thing, take a screenshot of every existing entry on the domain. If it all goes sideways, that screenshot puts it back.
- When it expires. An address that lapses next month will take your new site down with it. Renew it now and turn auto-renew on.
Doing it, step by step
- Log in to the registrar and find the section called DNS, DNS management, or advanced settings. Every one of them calls it something slightly different and every one of them buries it.
- Find the entry for the bare address, the one with no www. It is usually shown as a host of "@". Change its value to the address your new site gives you.
- Find or create the entry for www and point it at the same place. Both versions have to work, because you cannot control which one a customer types or which one is printed on an old flyer.
- Delete any leftover entries pointing the same names somewhere else. Two answers to the same question is the single most common cause of a site that works for you and not for your customer.
- Turn off any web forwarding, domain parking, or "coming soon" page the registrar has switched on. These override everything and they are on by default at several registrars.
- Save, and leave it alone.
Then wait. The change spreads gradually, because the old answer is cached in a lot of places for a set period. Minutes is common, a few hours is normal, and a full day is the outside case.
Why it looks broken in the middle
While it spreads, different people see different things. Your own computer is the worst judge, because it remembers the old answer hardest. Check on your phone with wifi turned off, on mobile data, which asks a completely different set of machines. If the phone sees the new site and the laptop does not, nothing is wrong, and restarting the laptop or waiting an hour usually sorts it.
The padlock is the other one. The certificate that produces it can only be issued once the address genuinely points at the new site, so for a short window after you switch, visitors can see a security warning. That is expected in the first hour. If it is still there the next day, something did not finish and it is worth asking.
The five things that actually go wrong
- Name servers changed while email lived on the domain. The big one. Mail stops arriving, nothing announces it, and you find out when a customer says they sent a quote request on Tuesday.
- Only one of www and the bare address was pointed. Half your customers get the new site and half get nothing, depending on what they typed.
- An old entry left in place. The new one was added, the old one was never deleted, and the domain now answers two ways at random.
- Web forwarding still switched on. It quietly wins over everything you just set.
- The domain expired mid-project. Website and email go together, and there is a window afterwards where the name can be taken by someone else.
What if you cannot get into the account
This is more common than anyone admits. The domain was registered by a web designer you no longer speak to, or by a staff member who left, or with an email address that stopped existing in 2018.
Start with a whois lookup to find which registrar holds it, then go to that registrar's account recovery process. They will ask you to prove the business owns the name, usually with your ABN, your ID, and sometimes a signed form. It is slow, it is boring, and it works.
Do not let the situation sit. A domain you cannot log in to is a domain you cannot renew, and the day it lapses is the day the problem gets much larger. If recovery genuinely fails, registering a fresh address costs you the printed material and a bit of history, and beats waiting another year.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
We do not take ownership of your domain and we do not need to. You keep it at your own registrar, in your own name, and we give you the exact entries to put in, including the www one people forget.
If it goes on to something else next year, it goes, and you do not need our permission. The certificate and its renewals are handled at our end, and we watch that the site stays up and that the certificate has not lapsed, because a lapsed one puts a browser warning in front of your customers before they read a word you wrote.
And if you have not built the site yet, building is free and takes about fifteen minutes, so you can see the thing before you point anything at it.
