Never let an agency own your website address

You decide to change the software that runs your website, only to find you cannot take your web address with you. The agency or platform that built your site registered the address in their name, and now they are refusing to hand it over.

This happens to independent businesses every day. A restaurant or a shop hires a service to get online quickly. The service handles everything, including buying the address. Years later, when the business wants to switch to a different system, the realization hits. They do not own their digital storefront.

What a domain actually is

A domain is the address a customer types into their browser to find you. It is the core of your online identity. A restaurant domain name is the specific string of words that points to your menu and ordering page. But a domain is not a physical object you buy once. It is a lease you renew, usually every year, through a company called a registrar.

Whoever holds the account with the registrar controls the address. If an agency set up your small business website address using their own master account, they are the legal registrant. You are just renting the address from them. If you stop paying their monthly fee, they can turn off the address or point it somewhere else.

The cost of a rented address

When you do not own your website domain, you are tied to your current provider. Moving to a new system means starting over with a brand new address. You have to reprint your menus, update your business cards, and change your storefront signage.

Worse, you lose the history of your old address. Search engines have spent years learning that your old domain belongs to your business. Regular customers have it bookmarked on their phones. If you abandon the address, you break all those links. You force your customers to hunt for you again, and some will simply order from the place next door instead.

How to protect your digital storefront

The only way to prevent this is to buy the domain yourself. You go to a public registrar, create an account using your own email address, and pay the registration fee directly. This usually costs between ten and twenty dollars a year.

When you hold the login to the registrar account, you hold the keys to your business. You can hire anyone you want to build or host your website. You just log into your registrar account and point the address to the new servers. The agency or the software company never owns your name.

If you already have a website running through an agency, ask them to transfer the domain to your own registrar account. Some will do this willingly, though others might charge an exit fee. It is a painful conversation to have, but it is better to have it now than when you are in a rush to switch systems.

Connecting your address to new software

Once the domain is in your own account, you can connect a custom domain to any modern website builder or ordering system. The process involves changing a few settings in your registrar dashboard to direct traffic to your new provider.

If you use lokal to run your business, the website builder automatically publishes a real site at a lokal.business subdomain. From there, you can connect a domain you already own. We do not register domains for you, because we believe your address should belong to you. You keep your domain in your own account, point it to your lokal site, and take it with you if you ever decide to leave.