Need to Terminate Your Website, But Keep Your Domain? Here's How

Something occurred with one of my clients this week, and it prompts me to write this post. Life has been directing her away from her independent business, and she decided to scale back on marketing expenses. That lead to terminating her website. Somehow her domain also got terminated, but she didn't realize that and had really wanted to keep it. I'm not sure retrieving it is going to be possible, but if possible, it may not be cheap.

Don't let this happen to you.

What You Can Do -- The Simple

If you ever want to put your website on pause for an extended period, or make it inaccessible to search engines, Wix gives you several simple, no cost options for that.

1. You can unpublish the site. That option is found under your Wix account dashboard, under Overview. Be aware that leaving your site in unpublished status for more than a couple days is likely to adversely affect your SEO.

2. You can prevent the site from being "seen" by the search engines, but still have it available to people via a direct domain name link. This option is also found under the Wix account dashboard, under SEO. Scroll to the bottom of the page and undo the toggle switch for allowing search engines to find you.

Both of the options above, though, maintain your Wix hosting and continue the costs for that.

What You Can Do -- The Advanced

Option 1:

If you have bought your domain name from a registrar other than Wix -- such as GoDaddy, NameCheap, BuyDomains, MadDogDomains, etc -- just go to that registrar and change the domain name servers (DNS) back to the original registrar settings.

Best to call their tech support to find out what those are at this point in time. This will preserve your domain, disconnect it from your Wix website, and allow you to terminate your website without losing your domain name.

If your domain name is your personal name, this is definitely the best thing to do.

When the DNS settings are changed, this will safeguard the domain from termination when you delete your website. But don't forget to continue paying your domain hosting fee.

Option 2:

If you bought your domain as part of your Wix upgrade process, you can transfer it to another domain hosting company. This link tells you how to do that: https://support.wix.com/en/article/transferring-your-wix-domain-away-from-wix-2477749. Be aware that domain transfers can take up to a week, and that during that time you will not have the benefit of Wix support.

I recommend speaking with customer support at your new domain host before starting the process so that they can advise you on any costs will charge you, or procedures they would advise.