Domain Integrity is a paid-for feature on sitevitals.co.uk but this work around lets you see your domain registrar without paying.

It’s essential to know where your domain is registered so that in an emergency you can quickly and easily log in to change the settings.

I recently had a client – a very large, professional organisation involving hundreds of people – nearly lose their domain name because the card they had on file with the domain registrar expired and they didn’t see the warning email they were sent.

After a few days (as there’s a grace period), their website went down. I use sitevitals.co.uk (on the free tier) to monitor their uptime, so I was alerted to the site being down, and when I looked into it, I quickly worked out that their domain had expired. I say “quickly worked out” because I’ve made websites for over 20 years and the clues added up for me – if you’re not in the same boat, you might want to pay for sitevitals.co.uk as it’ll then alert you – repeatedly and with lots of notice – if your domain doesn’t look like it’s going to renew smoothly.

In the story above, I then spent a Saturday evening trying to get hold of someone from the client organisation. I then, with their login, spent ages on live chat to the domain registrar trying to redeem things. Luckily we were just in time and they got to keep their domain. Which was a HUGE relief for the person who missed the email!

(Why does it matter? Couldn’t you just buy the domain again? Well yes, if it’s still free and no one else is on a waiting list and has swooped in and bought it on the day it goes back on the open market. That’s a scary gamble though.)

Anyway, this is why my newsletter this week, in the series “1 thing to do on your website this week” is all about making sure you know where your domain is registered, and the login for it.

Quick free check to find your domain registrar

If you really don’t have any idea of who your domain registar is, then you can follow these steps to get sitevitals.co.uk to tell you for free:

  1. Create a free sitevitals.co.uk account here.
  2. From the dashboard, click on the % number next to “Integrity” (in the screenshot below this is in a turquoise bubble and says “100%”) or from the little tab with the kinda world / sphere icon – it’s black in this screenshot because I was mousing over it, so it says “Integrity” above it too:

Once you’re on the Integrity report page, yes the screen is frosted out and there’s an upsell box over the top of it BUT you can still read the name of the domain registrar underneath! It’s at the top of the contents of the page, on the right – in the screenshot below you can just about see (it’s easier in real life as it’s bigger) it says “123-Reg Limited t/a 123-reg”.

And then you’re done! You can Google “123-reg” and do a password reset there for whichever email addresses you think you might have used. If you really can’t work out what email address you used, at least you can contact 123-reg and try and prove yourself to get access. (Trust me, this is a long winded process so don’t do it unless you have to – but it can be possible.)

If you know an agency registered it for you though, you’ll need to go back via them as 123-reg won’t be able to (easily, without a big to-do) take the domain from their account and put it into your own.

Making sure your email address is accessible

This is IMPORTANT.

If you are in an awful predicament and your domain has expired (or nearly totally expired) and so stopped working, any email addresses for that domain will stop working too. And if that happens and you don’t know your login for your domain registrar, you won’t be able to do a password reset because you won’t receive the password reset email.

Therefore make sure the email address you use isn’t tied to your domain, or have alerting in place, like with SiteVitals, so that you get loads of notice before your domain becomes unusable.