How to Move a Contractor Website to a New Provider Without Losing Your Domain

A contractor switching website providers usually worries about the wrong thing first. They worry about how the new site will look, whether the new builder is easier to use, whether the price is better. What actually wrecks these moves is the domain — the thing customers type into Google, the thing your business email runs through, the thing years of reviews and backlinks already point to. Lose control of it for even a few days and your phone stops ringing, because your site is either down or pointing nowhere.

Most of these disasters are avoidable. They happen because someone did things out of order — repointed DNS before confirming who actually owns the domain, or canceled the old host before the new site was live and tested. The fix is a sequence, followed in order, with nothing skipped: confirm ownership, unlock and pull the auth code, copy everything over, stand up the new site privately, switch DNS, then cancel. Here's each step in detail.

{"h2": "Step 1: Confirm you are actually the registrant"}

Before you touch a new provider, find out who holds the domain registration — not the hosting, the registration itself. These are often two different companies, and on older contractor sites they're frequently split in ways the owner doesn't realize, because whoever built the original site handled both at once and never separated them.

Log in to whoever you pay annually for the domain — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains (mostly migrated to Squarespace Domains now), or Network Solutions are the common ones. Check the registrant name and the account email on file. If it lists your business name or your own name with an email you control, you're clear to move forward with the rest of this guide. If it lists an agency, a freelance web designer, or something like "Bob's Web Services," stop here. That's the real problem, and it has to be solved before you sign up with anyone new — otherwise you'll build a whole new site on a domain you don't legally control.

If you haven't settled on the domain itself yet, or you're weighing whether to register a second one for a new service area, this guide to choosing a domain name for a contracting business covers that groundwork.

{"h2": "If an agency or old web guy owns your domain"}

This happens more than contractors expect, especially if someone else "handled the website stuff" when the business was starting out and registered the domain under their own account to make setup easier at the time. Recovering it takes a few different approaches depending on how cooperative that person or company still is.

If the relationship is still friendly, the easiest path is a direct ask: request that they initiate a registrar transfer of ownership to your name and email. Most registrars have a built-in "change of registrant" or "push" process that takes a day or two once the current owner approves it. Put the request in writing (email, not just a phone call) so there's a record if anything gets disputed later.

If the relationship has soured — the designer is unresponsive, the agency folded, or they're holding the domain hostage over an unpaid invoice — a few things still work in your favor. Domain registration is legally tied to the registrant of record, not to who built the website. If you can show you're the business owner (your name on the business license, your payment history for the site, your control of the associated email or phone number used to register it), most registrars have a dispute or ownership-verification process you can file directly with them, separate from whatever the web designer says. It's slower — often two to four weeks — but it works in the majority of cases where the domain clearly represents an operating business and not a personal project.

The outcome you're working toward either way is the same: your name or business name listed as registrant, your email as the account contact, and the ability to log in and generate an auth code yourself. Don't proceed to a new site build until that's settled — a beautiful new website on a domain you don't control is a liability, not an asset.

{"h2": "Step 2: Unlock the domain and get the auth code"}

Once you're confirmed as registrant, log in to the registrar account and look for domain settings. Two things need to happen: turn off "registrar lock" (sometimes called transfer lock), and generate the authorization code, also called an EPP code or transfer key. This code is what proves to a new registrar that you're authorized to move the domain, and most registrars email it to the account contact rather than displaying it outright.

You don't necessarily need to transfer the domain to a new registrar just because you're switching website providers — plenty of contractors keep the domain where it is and simply repoint it. But get the auth code anyway, even if you don't use it right away. It confirms the lock is off, confirms you have access, and gives you a fallback if the new provider does require a full transfer rather than a DNS change.

{"h2": "Step 3: Copy content and photos before you touch anything"}

Before you build anything new, pull everything off the old site: every page's text, your service area list, your license and insurance numbers as currently published, testimonials, and — most importantly — your project photos at full resolution. Don't screenshot pages; download the actual image files if you can get to them, or re-download them from wherever they originally came from (your phone's camera roll, a shared drive, a project folder). Compressed screenshots look noticeably worse once they're back up on a new site.

If your current site doesn't make this easy — some older builder platforms lock content behind their own export format — at minimum get everything you can copy and paste into a document, plus every photo you can save individually. This is also a reasonable time to tighten up pages you were never happy with. If your service pages have been thin or generic, this breakdown of what to include on a contractor service page is worth reading before you rebuild rather than after.

{"h2": "Step 4: Stand up the new site on a temporary address"}

Build and review the entire new site before it's live on your real domain. Every provider worth using will give you a temporary or staging URL — something like yourbusiness.newprovider.com — where you can check every page, test the contact form, confirm photos loaded correctly, and make sure phone numbers and service areas are right. Send that link to a crew member or a friend and have them click through it on a phone, since that's how most of your traffic will arrive anyway.

This step is where contractors catch the mistakes that are expensive to fix after launch: a wrong phone number carried over from an old template, a service area page that still lists a town you don't cover anymore, a contact form that submits into a void instead of your inbox. Test the form specifically — submit a fake lead and confirm it actually reaches you, because a broken lead form on a freshly launched site can go unnoticed for weeks.

{"h2": "Step 5: Point DNS to the new provider"}

Only after the new site is fully built and tested do you touch DNS. This is the step people get nervous about, but it's usually just updating two or three records — commonly an A record and a CNAME — in the same account where you unlocked the domain in step two. Your new provider will give you the exact values to enter.

DNS changes take anywhere from a few minutes to about 48 hours to fully propagate across the internet, so expect a short window where some visitors see the old site and some see the new one. Don't panic and don't make more changes during that window — let it settle. Keep the old site's hosting active during this period rather than canceling it immediately; if something's wrong with the DNS change, you want the ability to revert quickly rather than having nothing to go back to.

{"h2": "Step 6: Cancel the old provider only after everything checks out"}

Give it a few days after the switch before canceling the old hosting account. Check that the new site loads correctly from multiple devices and networks, confirm your business email still works if it ran through the same provider, and check Google Search Console or just search your business name to make sure nothing broke. Once you've confirmed the new site is stable and getting real traffic, cancel the old plan and stop paying for hosting you no longer need.

One thing people forget here: if your old provider also hosted your email addresses, migrating those is a separate project from migrating the website, and it needs its own MX record changes with its own window where mail can bounce if done carelessly. If email matters to your business — and it does, since estimate PDFs and invoices often go out through it — plan that piece deliberately rather than as an afterthought during the DNS switch.

{"h2": "How this works if you move to Trusso"}

If you're switching to Trusso's contractor website tool, the sequence above still applies, but the build itself is simpler because Trusso drafts the site only from details you confirm — it doesn't invent licenses, years in business, warranties, or reviews you haven't given it. You pick from curated mobile-first themes, and the project gallery is built from your actual job photos, with your approval required on every image before it's published. Hosting, SSL, and uptime monitoring are handled for you, so there's no separate hosting account to juggle during the switch.

Connecting your existing domain is two DNS records, matching step five above exactly — you don't need to transfer registrars or change who holds your domain. And once the site is live, every form submission lands directly in your Trusso leads with a push notification, automatically matched against your existing customers rather than sitting in a generic inbox you have to check manually.

Switching any piece of your business software, not just the website, tends to feel scarier in theory than it is in practice if you follow a real sequence instead of winging it. This general look at how hard it actually is to switch field-service software applies the same logic — most of the risk is in skipping steps, not in the switch itself.