Why your business needs to own its website address

When a marketing agency builds a website for a restaurant, they often register the domain name as part of the package. Five years later, you decide to change providers, and you discover you do not own your own internet address.

A domain name is the address people type to find you online. It is property. Like any property, it has an owner of record.

The owner of record is the person or company whose name is on the registration. The registrar is the company that sold the domain, like Namecheap or Google Domains or GoDaddy. The registrar only takes instructions from the owner.

If an agency registered the domain for you, the agency is the owner. You might have paid for it, and the domain might be the exact name of your business, but to the registrar, the agency is the legal owner.

The cost of a rented address

This arrangement is fine as long as you stay with that agency. The problem comes when you want to leave.

If you want to move your website to a new system, you have to point the domain to the new system's servers. To do that, you need to log in to the registrar. If the agency owns the domain, they have the login.

Some agencies will transfer the domain to you when you ask. Others will charge a release fee. A few will refuse entirely, or they have gone out of business and are impossible to reach.

If you cannot get control of the domain, you have to buy a new one. You have to reprint your menus, your signs, and your business cards. You have to update your Google Business profile and your social media accounts. Worse, anyone who types in your old address will find a broken page, or worse, a page the agency sold to someone else.

How to keep control

The only way to guarantee you keep your address is to register it yourself.

Registering a small business website address takes about five minutes. You go to a registrar, search for the name you want, and pay the annual fee. The fee is usually ten to twenty dollars a year.

Once you register it, you own it. You have the login. You get the renewal emails.

If you hire someone to build your website, you do not give them ownership of the domain. You can give them temporary technical access to point the domain to the new site, or they can tell you what settings to change and you can do it yourself.

Connecting a domain you already own

When you use a website builder, the system will usually give you a free address on their own domain. For example, if you build a site on lokal, it starts at a lokal.business address.

That is enough to get started, but you should connect a custom domain as soon as you are ready to publish.

Connecting a domain means telling the registrar to send visitors to your website builder's servers. The website builder will give you a few lines of text, called DNS records. You log in to your registrar, paste those records into the settings, and save.

It usually takes an hour or two for the internet to update. After that, when someone types your domain, they see your website.

With lokal, the website builder is included in the single $99.99 monthly plan. You can connect a domain you already own, and you keep complete control of it.