Website Best Practices: Don’t Let Your Accounts Lapse

Account Lapses Can Cost You

Most of the accounts you will have for your website can be renewed yearly, and it can be really easy to forget about. We’ve worked with more than one small business owner who has paid for a custom website, only to lose access when a payment lapses. 

Whether your site is old or new, we recommend you sign up for auto-renewals for all business-critical services so you don’t lose anything permanently or have to pay more to get something back. 

Here’s a quick list of what WordPress site owners often pay for:

• Domain Name
• Yearly hosting fees 
• Premium theme
• Premium plugins

Maintaining access to your property

If you aren’t comfortable setting up auto-renew, it’s important to make sure you are getting the reminders for renewal when they come through. Most services will require you to enter an email to sign up, and that should be an email address you have access to. 

This is especially important when you have employees or contractors setting up services for you and it’s critical when you’re setting up your domain and hosting accounts.

If you lose access to the email inbox associated with the account you won’t know if:

• Your associated credit card expires
• Your service cannot be auto-renewed
• The provider goes out of business and you need to find an alternative
• Changes are made to the account

Any one of these occurrences could result in you not having a domain, hosting account, or services your site, and business, need. We’ve seen it happen, and watched clients forced to pay thousands to get their own domains back. Making sure you always see emails from your service providers can help protect your site.