Moving your church website without losing your domain (or your email).

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds.Proverbs 27:23, KJV

Most church websites change hands the same way: the person who built it moves away, or the company that hosted it sends a renewal email nobody understands, and suddenly a deacon is holding a password on a sticky note. The site itself is rarely the problem. What goes wrong is the plumbing underneath it — the domain name and the email that rides on it. Those are the two things a church can actually lose, and they are the two things almost nobody checks first.

This is the checklist I walk through with a church before anything moves. None of it requires a technical person. It requires a notebook, an afternoon, and a willingness to make three phone calls.

Three different things get called "the website."

When someone says "our website is with GoDaddy" or "our website is with Wix," they may be describing one company doing three jobs, or three companies doing one job each. It helps to name the jobs.

Keep those three words — registrar, DNS, host — and the rest of this page reads plainly.

Find out who actually owns the domain.

Not who pays for it. Not who "set it up." Whose account it sits in. Domains live under a login at a registrar, and that login is the deed. If the login belongs to a former volunteer's personal email, or to the web company that built the site in 2014, the church does not control its own name — it borrows it.

Go to your registrar's own lookup page (or ICANN's public lookup at lookup.icann.org) and type the domain. You'll see the registrar's name and the expiration date. Then find the login. Ask around. Check old invoices. If the domain is in someone else's account, the first move — before any website work — is to have it transferred into an account the church controls, with a church email address and a church card on it.

Write down the map.

One sheet of paper, kept in the church office file. It looks like this: registrar and account holder; where DNS is served from (the "nameservers"); who hosts the website; who provides email; renewal dates for each; and where the passwords are kept. Most churches have never had this page. Making it is half the job, and it is the half that outlives whoever does the move.

The email trap: MX records.

Here is the mistake that produces the panicked Monday-morning phone call. The church's email — pastor@yourchurch.org — is delivered because of a few lines in DNS called MX records. When a new web host says "just point your nameservers at us," they are offering to become your DNS. Do that, and the new DNS starts empty. The website works. The email stops, silently, because the new phone book has no line for it. Nobody notices until Wednesday.

The fix is simple and must happen before the switch: open the current DNS, and copy every record down. Every one. Especially:

Then re-create all of those at the new DNS first, and only afterward change the nameservers. If that sentence made you nervous, there's a simpler path: leave DNS where it is and change only the one record that points the website (A or CNAME for @ and www). The email never moves; the site does.

Don't transfer the domain and move the site in the same week.

"Transferring" a domain means moving the name itself to a different registrar. It is a separate thing from moving the website, and it is slow: a transfer can take several days to complete, and registrars lock the name against changes for a period after a transfer or after the owner's details change. If you try to do both at once, you can find yourself unable to fix a DNS mistake while the transfer is pending.

The domain does not have to live at the same company as the website. Leave the registrar exactly where it is. Point the name at the new host. If you want to consolidate later, do it in a quiet month, on its own.

Lower the TTL a couple of days before.

Every DNS record carries a number called TTL — "time to live" — which is how long the rest of the internet is allowed to remember the old answer. A common default is an hour; some are a day. If you change where the site points while the TTL is 24 hours, some people see the new site immediately and others see the old one until tomorrow, and you can't tell which is which.

Two days before the move, edit the records you plan to change and set the TTL to 300 (five minutes). After the move settles, put it back. It costs nothing and turns a day of confusion into a few minutes.

Keep the old addresses alive.

Somewhere out there, the church's address is printed: on the sign, in the bulletin, on the Facebook page, on the Google listing, in a missionary's newsletter from 2019. Most of those point at the home page and will be fine. But some point deeper — /sermons, /about-us, /give — and if the new site names those pages differently, every one of those links becomes a dead end.

Take a full copy before the old site goes dark.

Before you cancel anything, get everything out: the text of every page, every photo, the sermon audio, the events list, the logo files. If the old platform has an export button, use it — and assume the export is partial, because it usually is. Save pages as PDF as well. Download the audio. Copy it all to a drive the church owns, not a personal laptop, and keep it even after the new site is up. The old company will not keep it for you once the account closes.

Move on a Tuesday morning.

Not Saturday night. Not the week of VBS. Not the day the bulletin goes to print. Move when there's time to notice a problem and fix it before it meets a Sunday. Give the change 24 to 48 hours before deciding anything is broken. And have someone check email from outside the building — a phone on cellular, not the church Wi-Fi — because your own network may keep remembering the old answer longer than everyone else.

What to check after.

That's the whole list. None of it is hard, and all of it is the kind of thing that only hurts when it's skipped. Keep the page. The next volunteer will thank you, and so will the pastor who never has to hear the words "MX record" again.