Making sure your domain is renewed is essential. If someone purchases your domain before you do, you may lose your whole website.
A councillor from our local area, Lee Siddall, found this out last week. Cheshire Live reports that Siddall clicked on a link from the local council’s website to go to a dyslexia charity’s website, and was stunned to find that the website no longer exists and had been taken over by, of all things, a Thai adult website.
What should I do if I change my domain?
It seems that the organisation behind the website had moved it to another domain and left their old domain to expire. What they should have done was to continue to renew the old website and redirect this to the new domain. This is important especially if you have links from other websites, as these sites will no longer link to yours.
Failing to do this will also affect your website’s performance in search results, as you will have lost any backlinks to your site. So, making sure that your old domain is redirected is essential.
This underlines the importance of making sure that you auto-renew your website’s domain to make sure that no one else takes over your website, and that people who click on links from other websites are not presented with a website that no connection to what they were originally looking for. It’s also a reminder that if you link to external sites, it’s good practice to check these periodically.
At Engage Web, as part of our Fresh Start website package, we include renewing your websites domain so that you never need worry about it directing to something altogether different. To find out more about our Fresh Start package, get in touch with our friendly team today.
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