Your domain name — the yourbusiness.co.uk behind your website and your email — is one of the most important things your business owns. It’s also one of the most overlooked. Two things can take you offline overnight: it quietly lapses, or someone gets into the account that controls it. Both are avoidable in an afternoon.
First: can you actually log into it?
Start with an honest question — if you needed to change something about your domain right now, could you? A surprising number of businesses can’t. The account was often set up years ago by a web designer, a former employee, or an IT company you’ve since parted ways with. So step one is simple:
- Find out who your registrar is (123 Reg, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Namecheap and the like — a quick WHOIS lookup will tell you).
- Make sure you have the login, and that the account is in your business’s name — not a third party’s.
- Check the contact email on the account is one you actually monitor.
- Make sure it’s held by you or your current IT provider — and if you’re thinking of switching providers, move the domain into your own account first, before anything else.
If a supplier holds it “on your behalf,” get it moved into an account you own. It’s your asset, not theirs.
The big one: turn on auto-renew
This is the single most important setting, and the easiest to fix. If your domain expires, your website and your email go down at the same time — and after a short grace period, anyone can buy it. We’ve seen businesses lose their domain to opportunists who then demand a small fortune to sell it back.
- Switch auto-renew on for every domain you own.
- Make sure there’s a valid payment card on file that won’t expire before the domain does.
- Confirm renewal reminders go to a monitored inbox, not someone’s old address.
Set it — then check it often. Auto-renew can still quietly fail (an expired card, a billing change), so a quick look a couple of times a year is well worth it.
Lock it down
Whoever controls your domain controls your website and your email, so the account deserves the same care as your online banking:
- Turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) on the registrar account — this alone stops the vast majority of hijacks.
- Use a strong, unique password, kept in a password manager and not reused anywhere else.
- Enable the registrar / transfer lock so nobody can move the domain to another provider without your say-so.
- Turn on domain (WHOIS) privacy to keep your details off public records and cut down on spam.
- If your registrar supports it, switch on DNSSEC for extra protection against DNS tampering.
- Don’t use an email on the same domain as the account login or recovery address. If that domain ever lapses or is hijacked, you’d lose the very mailbox you need to get it back — use a separate address.
Why it’s worth ten minutes
A hijacked or expired domain isn’t a small inconvenience — it’s your entire online presence gone in one hit. Customers can’t reach your site, email stops flowing, and putting it right can take days you don’t have. Ten minutes of housekeeping now saves a very bad week later.