Domain Name Renewal: What Happens If You Forget

A domain name is rented, not bought. You pay for it a year or two at a time, and if that payment fails, you lose it. Not immediately, and not without warning, but the warnings go to an email address people often stop reading.

When a domain lapses it takes the website and, in most cases, the business email with it. This is what actually happens, in what order, and how to make sure it never happens to you.

What domain name renewal is

When you register a domain you are buying the exclusive right to use it for a set period, usually one or two years. At the end of that period you renew it or it goes back on the market. Registrars are required to remind you, but the reminders go to the contact email on the registration, which for a lot of small businesses is an old address nobody checks.

Renewal typically costs somewhere between a few pounds and about twenty a year for a .co.uk or .com. It is the cheapest thing your business owns and the one with the most attached to it.

What happens if you forget to renew

Domains do not vanish the moment they expire. There is a sequence, and knowing it tells you how worried to be.

The exact timings vary by domain type and registrar. UK .co.uk domains follow Nominet’s rules, which allow a longer protected period than most, so a lapsed .co.uk is often more recoverable than a lapsed .com. Either way, the message is the same: act in the first month and it is cheap, act later and it is expensive, leave it and it is gone.

Why losing a domain is worse than losing a website

A website can be rebuilt. A domain that someone else has registered may be unrecoverable at any price.

• Your email dies with it. If you use an address on your own domain, every message stops. This is usually what people notice first.
• Your search rankings go. Everything you built up is attached to that address.
• Every printed thing you own becomes wrong. Vans, business cards, signage, invoices.
• Someone else can take it. Expired domains with existing traffic are bought automatically by people who watch for exactly this.

How to check your renewal date right now

Two minutes, worth doing while you are reading this.

1. Look up your domain on a public WHOIS service. Search “whois” plus your domain name.
2. Find the expiry or renewal date. For .co.uk domains, Nominet’s own lookup shows it.
3. Check the registrant name. It should be your business, not your web designer, not an agency.
4. Check the admin email. It should be an address you actually read.

If the registrant is not you, sort that out before anything else. Getting a domain moved into your name is straightforward while everyone is on good terms and difficult when they are not.

How to renew a domain name

• Log in to your registrar, which is whoever you bought the domain from. Common ones are 123 Reg, GoDaddy, Namecheap and IONOS, or your hosting company if they registered it for you.
• Find the domain and choose renew. Renew for the longest period you are comfortable with. Multi-year renewal is usually the same price per year and removes several chances to forget.
• Turn on auto renew, then check the card on file has not expired. Auto renew with a dead card is the most common way people lose a domain while believing they were covered.
• Update the contact email to one somebody reads.

If you have already missed it

Do not panic, but do move today.

1. Log in to the registrar and try to renew normally. Inside the grace period this usually just works.
2. If it will not let you, ring them. Redemption is often not self-service, and phoning is faster than emailing.
3. Expect a redemption fee if you are past the grace period. Pay it. It is far cheaper than losing the address.
4. Once it is back, set auto renew, fix the card, and change the contact email so it cannot repeat.

Who should hold your domain?

You should, in your business name, on an account you can log in to. That is worth stating plainly because it is not always what happens.

There is nothing wrong with your web designer managing renewals for you. There is something wrong with them being the registered owner, because then the address is theirs and not yours. When we build a site, the domain and the site stay in the client’s name, and we say so in writing.

If you are not sure what your arrangement is, that is one of the questions in our website audit checklist, along with the other things worth knowing before you need to know them.

Renewal, transfer and hosting are three different things

These get muddled constantly, so it is worth separating them.

You can change host without touching the domain, and change registrar without touching the host. Losing the domain, though, breaks both.

The simplest way to never think about this again

• Renew for multiple years at once.
• Turn on auto renew and check the card annually.
• Use a contact email that is not on the domain itself, so a lapse cannot stop the warning reaching you.
• Put the date in the calendar with a month’s notice.
• Or have somebody watch it for you.

That last one is part of what a website maintenance plan covers, alongside hosting, backups and updates. None of it is complicated. It just needs to be somebody’s job, and the reason domains lapse is almost always that it was nobody’s.

If you are not sure where your domain is registered or whose name is on it, send us the address and we will look it up and tell you straight, whether or not we ever work together.