·By Linran YU
Someone Else Is Open at Your Old Address
What happens when a domain lapses, and the one thing to do first.
A domain is not something you buy once. You rent it, and the rent is due every year.
Miss that date and the address does not sit there waiting for you. After a while it goes back on the market, and there are people whose whole business is watching for the moment it does.
So the name gets bought and a site goes up selling the same kind of thing you sell. A jewelry shop loses its domain, and weeks later there is a jewelry site at that address. Not a copy of your pages. The same category, at the address your customers already know.
The damage lands on you
Your customer does not know that the address changed hands. They see jewelry at the address they associate with you, and they assume it is you.
If the site looks cheap, they decide your taste got worse. If they order and the product is poor, they blame you. If they lose money, they blame you louder, and they tell other people, and the name they use is yours.
You never made the sale and you never saw the money. You only get the complaint.
The mistake that keeps it going
I know of a business that lost its domain this way. They hired a new team and started building a replacement site, which was the right call.
But all the while, their Yelp page still pointed to the old address. So did other listings. Every customer who looked them up was being handed to the copycat, for months, by their own profiles.
The reasoning was understandable: wait until the new site is finished, then update everything at once.
Take the old link down first
Do not wait. Pulling that link is a separate job from building the new site, and it is the urgent one.
Go through everywhere your address appears and remove it. Review sites, map listings, social profiles, directories, email signatures, anywhere you can edit. Where there is a field for a website, leave it blank or put your phone number in the profile instead. An empty field costs you nothing. A link to a copycat costs you customers.
Then, when the new site is ready, put it in.
Every day the old link stays up, you are paying to advertise someone else’s shop.
Keeping it from happening
Turn on auto-renew, then check that the card on file has not expired, which is how most of these actually happen. Make sure the renewal notice reaches someone who still reads it, and not a web designer who moved on years ago.
Register for several years at a time, put the date in your own calendar, and keep your own registrar login. If you cannot see for yourself when the domain expires, you do not really control it.
Worth saying plainly
The website is a project. The address is an asset.