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Setting up a new Google Workspace
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A checklist rather than a guide, for setting up business email on your own domain. Google Workspace is Gmail, Calendar and Drive running on your address rather than a gmail.com one. The order below matters: the account exists first, then the users, then the bit that actually switches your email over, and that last step is the one to plan rather than improvise.
Why it is worth doing properly. Sending business email from a gmail.com or hotmail.com address costs you deliverability and credibility, and it means you do not own the mailbox: if the person who created it leaves, their email leaves with them. On your own domain you keep the addresses whatever happens to the people.
The list, in order
- Create the Workspace account
Sets up the account and proves you own the domain. Nothing else can happen until this is done. - Add your people
One user per person who needs their own mailbox. You are billed per user, so this is the step that determines the monthly cost. - Set up aliases
Addresses like info@ or accounts@ that deliver into an existing mailbox. Aliases are free, unlike users, so this is where most people save money without realising. - Point your email at Google (MX records)
The switch-over. Read the warning below before doing this one. - Sign everybody in
On computers and phones. Worth doing as a group rather than leaving people to it, because the phone setup is where the questions come. - Set up signatures
Last, and genuinely worth the ten minutes. A consistent signature across the team is free marketing on every email you send. Ask us for the wording and we will make it match your brand.
Step 4 is the one that can lose email. Plan it. Changing your MX records moves where your mail is delivered. Do it wrong, or at the wrong moment, and messages sent during the changeover can bounce or land in the old mailbox where nobody sees them. Never do it on a Friday afternoon, never right before you are away, and tell us when you are planning to so we can be around. Better still, let us do it with you on a call. It takes ten minutes and the risk drops to nothing.
One decision to make early
Work out who needs a user and who only needs an alias, before you start adding people. A user is a real mailbox for a real person and is billed monthly. An alias is another address arriving in a mailbox that already exists, and is free.
So: five staff who each need their own inbox is five users. But info@, sales@, accounts@ and hello@ all landing with the office manager is four aliases and costs nothing extra. Getting this the wrong way round is the single most common way businesses overpay for Workspace.
After it is running
- Resetting somebody’s password, for when a member of staff is locked out.
- When somebody leaves, do not just delete the account. Their email history and files go with it. Ask us first; there is a right order that keeps the records.
Keep at least two administrators. If the only admin is on holiday or has left, routine jobs like resetting a password become a recovery case with Google. Two admins costs nothing.
What we need if something fails
Which step, and what you saw. If it is step 4 and email has stopped arriving, say so immediately and lead with that rather than working through the rest of the list. It is the one item here that is genuinely urgent.
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