Switching real estate website providers.

01Ask these before you sign anything new

• Who is the registrant on the domain? Not who manages it — whose name is on the registration. If it is your current provider's, fix that before you do anything else. A domain you do not control is leverage against you.
• Can you export your content? Pages, blog posts, images. Ask for a real export, not a promise of one.
• Where do your leads live, and can you take them? Names, emails, phone numbers and their history are your business records.
• Whose DDF® credentials are they? They should be yours. CREA's rules say a participant may not share them with a technology provider, so if someone else holds them, something is off. See the DDF® guide.
• What notice do you owe? Read the term. Some agreements auto-renew for a year on a date you have forgotten.
• Who runs your email? If the same provider handles mail on your domain, moving the website can take your inbox with it. Plan that separately and first.

02The part that costs people traffic

• A new site almost always changes URLs. Your old listing pages, your old blog posts, your old neighbourhood pages — all at new addresses.
• Without redirects, every one of those becomes a dead end. Google drops them, whatever rankings they had disappear, and anyone with an old link lands on a 404. This is the single most common way a rebuild goes backwards, and the people it happens to usually do not notice for months.
• Redirects are not optional and they are not difficult. They just have to be somebody's job, in writing, before launch.

Moving a site across is $399 with us, and mapping the old URLs to the new ones is the bulk of that work.

03A sane order of operations

• Confirm the domain is in your name. Everything else depends on this.
• Take your own backup — content, images, leads — before anyone touches anything.
• Build the new site alongside the old one. It stays private until it is ready. Nothing goes dark.
• Map every old URL to its new home while both still exist. This is much harder afterwards.
• Move email separately, and earlier, so a mail problem never coincides with a launch.
• Switch the domain, then watch. Check the important pages, submit the new sitemap, and expect a couple of unsettled weeks in the rankings.
• Cancel the old service last — after the new one has been live and correct for a while, not the same afternoon.

04What good looks like on the way out

• A provider worth leaving on good terms will hand over an export promptly, confirm the domain is yours, and not make the last month awkward. Plenty do exactly that.
• If yours will not, you have learned something useful about who to work with next — and it is worth asking any new provider the same questions before you sign, including us.

For the record: your domain, your content, your leads and your DDF® credentials stay yours here, and it is written down before we start.