If I move my website, will my email stop working?

Not if you're careful. Your website and your email are two separate services that happen to share a name. Moving one doesn't have to touch the other.

The trouble is that they share that name through one small, easily forgotten settings page. Get that page wrong during a move and the website comes up fine on the new host while email quietly stops arriving. Here's how the pieces fit, in plain English, and what to check before anyone presses the button.

Four things that sound like one

When people say "our website", they usually mean four separate things, often with four different companies.

The domain. Your name on the internet, such as yourbusiness.co.uk. You rent it from a registrar. I've written before about checking who actually owns it.

The DNS. A list of signposts for the domain. One says where the website lives. Another says where the email goes. Whoever looks after this list controls both.

The web hosting. The server your website runs on.

The email. The service that holds your mailboxes. For most small businesses now, that's Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, not the web host.

The website and the email never talk to each other. They only meet in the DNS.

The signpost that matters for email

The DNS entry for email is called an MX record. When someone emails you, Google's own guide explains, "the sender's computer looks up the MX records for your email domain" and delivers the message wherever they point.

So as long as your MX records still point at Microsoft or Google, your email keeps working, whatever happens to the website.

The website has its own signposts, usually an A record or a CNAME. Moving the website should mean changing those, and only those.

How a website move breaks email

Here's the catch. The DNS list itself has to live somewhere, and quite often it lives with the web host.

When you move to a new host, they may ask you to point the domain's "nameservers" at them. That doesn't edit your list. It swaps it for theirs. Their list will have the website signposts filled in, because that's what they're there for. Whether it has your MX records depends entirely on whether someone copied them across.

If nobody did, mail for your domain has nowhere to go. Nothing looks broken on the website, so it can take a while before anyone notices that the enquiries have dried up.

There are a few other records worth copying for the same reason. Microsoft's setup guide lists an SPF record ("highly recommended") and DKIM records, which help your mail get past spam filters. Lose those and email may still arrive, but what you send is more likely to land in junk.

Before the move: take a copy of the list

Do this before anything changes, not after.

1. Find out who runs your DNS. Google's free Dig tool will show you. Type in your domain and choose NS. The answer names whose nameservers you're using.
2. Look up your MX records. In the same tool, choose MX. Write down or screenshot what it shows. If it mentions outlook.com or google.com, your email is with Microsoft or Google.
3. Export or screenshot the whole DNS list. Log in wherever your DNS is managed and save every record, including the TXT ones. This is your safety net.
4. Ask the new host one question. "Do I need to change nameservers, or can I just update the website records?" If you can leave the DNS where it is and only change the website records, email isn't touched at all. That's the safest option.

If you do have to move nameservers, put every record from step 3 into the new list before you make the switch. Then check the MX lookup again afterwards and compare it with your notes.

Timing

DNS changes aren't instant. Each record carries a "time to live", which is how long other computers remember it before checking again. Microsoft's examples use 3600 seconds, which is an hour. Google warns MX changes can take up to 72 hours to be recognised everywhere.

So do the switch early in a quiet week, not at 4pm on a Friday. Send yourself a test email from an outside account, such as a personal Gmail, an hour or so afterwards, and again the next morning.

If the website is a shop

Email is one part of the move. With an online shop there's more to keep an eye on: orders in flight, payment settings, and every old page address that needs to point at its new one so you don't lose your place in Google. The team at Dev Partners have a good guide to protecting your search rankings during a move, and they handle the whole job if you'd rather not, through their ecommerce migration service.

The short version

Your website and email are separate. They meet in the DNS. Before any move, save a copy of every DNS record, and if you can, change only the website records and leave everything else alone.

If you'd like someone to look over the plan first, an hour of my time is usually enough to spot the record that would have gone missing.