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Getting your website access sorted
On This Page
A checklist rather than a guide. Three separate things own your website and people routinely mix them up: the domain is your address, the hosting is the building your site sits in, and the WordPress login is the key to the front door. They are often with three different companies. We usually need all three, and knowing which is which is half the job.
You will end up understanding your own setup better. That is a real side benefit. A surprising number of businesses cannot say who holds their domain, which is a genuine risk regardless of who does their marketing. Working down this list answers it.
The list
- Your WordPress login
So we can make changes. Add us as a user rather than sharing your own password, which also means you can see what we changed and when. - Your domain registrar
Where your web address is registered. Needed for anything involving DNS: a new site going live, email changes, or adding a subdomain. Two of the common ones:If yours is somewhere else, say so and we will send the right instructions.
- Your hosting
Where the site’s files live. Sometimes the same company as the domain, often not. If we are hosting your site for you, this step is already done and you can skip it. - Make sure you can get in yourself
Not for our benefit. Worth confirming early that you have a working login and know the address, because the moment you actually need it tends to be the moment something is wrong.
If you do not know where your domain is registered, find out before anything else. It is the one thing that is genuinely painful to recover if the person who set it up has gone and the renewal email goes to an address nobody reads. Losing a domain takes a website and all its email down at once. Tell us and we can look up who holds it from the public record.
Two things worth checking while you are in there
- Who receives the renewal emails? If it is a former employee’s address, change it to one somebody actually monitors. This is the most valuable five minutes on this page.
- Is auto-renew on? For the domain specifically. An expired domain is a hard outage, not a warning.
If you get stuck
- No idea who hosts the site. Common and easy for us to work out. Just ask.
- The account is in a former employee’s name. Tell us early. There is usually a recovery route, but it takes time and is much easier before something breaks than after.
- A previous agency holds everything. Also common. We have done this handover many times and can tell you exactly what to ask them for.
Do not change nameservers or DNS records because a checklist somewhere told you to. Those settings control both your website and your email, and a wrong value takes both offline for hours while it propagates. There are legitimate reasons to change them, and we will walk you through it or do it with you on a call. Never as an unattended task.
What we need if something fails
Which of the three you were working on, and what you saw. If the answer is “I do not know which of the three this is”, say that instead. It is a perfectly reasonable place to start and we would rather untangle it with you than have you guess.
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