How to switch your estate agent website provider

Most agents who want to move website supplier do not know whether they can, and that uncertainty keeps more agencies on bad websites than any contract does. So before the how, the reassurance: yes, you can move, your domain can come with you, and your Google standing can survive intact. The only question is how much of the rest you own, and one email to your current supplier will tell you.

First, find out what you actually own

Send your supplier one short email asking four things: do we own our domain and can you release it; do we own the website design and content or is it licensed on your platform; can you export our content, property archive and any review or valuation data; and what notice, exit fees or outstanding term applies. The answers sort you into one of two situations. If you own the domain and the content, you are moving house: some effort, nothing lost. If the site lives on a rented platform, you are rebuilding, and it becomes even more important that the domain, at least, is yours, because the domain is where your twenty years of Google standing actually lives.

The domain is the crown jewels

Whatever else happens, keep the domain. It carries your accumulated authority, your email addresses and every link ever pointed at you. Moving it is routine: an authorisation code from the current registrar, a transfer to one you control, valid within days. If your supplier registered the domain in their own name years ago, and it happens more often than anyone admits, resolving that is job one, before you announce anything.

How the move works when it is done properly

A competent new supplier builds the new site in private while the old one stays live, connects your CRM feed in parallel, and maps every old address to its new equivalent so that when the switch happens, every link, portal listing and Google result lands somewhere sensible instead of on an error page. Those redirects are what preserve your search standing: skip them and rankings really can fall; do them properly and Google follows the move within weeks. The switch itself is then a DNS change, minutes of work, done at a quiet hour, with the old site as the instant fallback. Your feed cutover is agreed with the CRM in advance so listings never blink.

What it costs, honestly

The build is the build, priced like any new website. The migration on top, content moved, redirects mapped, feeds re-pointed, is real work but bounded work, and any decent supplier includes or prices it plainly. Beware two numbers at opposite ends: an exit fee from the old supplier that was never mentioned when you signed, and a migration quoted at zero by the new one, which usually means nobody has thought about the redirects, and you will pay for that in rankings instead of pounds.

Choose your next supplier by their exit, not their entrance

The cleanest test of a website company is what happens when you leave it. Ask every candidate, including us, the same four questions from the top of this piece, about their own service. Our answers, on the record: you own the domain and the site outright, the care plan is month to month with a month's notice, your content and data export whenever you ask, and there is no exit fee, because we would rather keep clients with work than with paperwork. Twenty years in, most of our clients have stayed longer than any contract could have made them.