On Monday I launched a website for a client's club. The site was finished, tested and hosted. The only job left was pointing the client's domain at it, and that takes one small change in the domain's settings.
I sent him the exact record to add. The client added it, saved it and told me it was done. Nothing happened. The old site was still showing. This is how I found out why, because it is a trap that catches a lot of small business owners, and it has nothing to do with the website itself.
What DNS actually is
DNS is the address book of the internet. When someone types your web address, DNS tells their phone which server holds your site. To launch a new site you change one entry in that address book so it points at the new place.
The catch is that there can be more than one address book for the same domain. Only one of them is the real one, and the internet only reads that one.
How I found the problem
The page my client had edited looked right. It was the domain company's own dashboard, with a section called DNS Settings and a record exactly as I had written it. But a domain has a setting called nameservers, which says who answers questions about it. I looked that up with a free tool, and it named a different company: the platform that had hosted the old site.
So the records my client had carefully edited were a copy that nothing was reading. The domain company's page still lets you edit them, and still saves them, which is why it felt as if it should have worked.
Why this happens
A domain is registered in one place, but its nameservers can point somewhere else. It usually happens when a previous web designer or a hosting platform set things up, and nobody remembers it years later. Everything keeps working until the day you want to change something.
The order that fixed it safely
Switching nameservers moves control of everything on the domain, including email. So the order matters:
- Ask what else the old setup is used for. I asked my client directly. The old platform was also how they sent emails to their members, so I asked them to keep that account open.
- Check the email records exist in the new place first. The records that make email work were already in the domain company's own settings. If they had been missing, switching would have broken their email.
- Prepare everything before the switch. I had my client add the new site's record, and set up a forward from the address without www to the address with it, while nothing was live yet.
- Write down the old nameservers. That gives you a way back in a minute if something looks wrong.
- Switch, then test from the outside. I checked the nameservers, the website record and the email records from my own machine, not from the client's dashboard, and then the site itself.
My client made the switch and the new site was live in under an hour. Their email was never interrupted.
What to check on your own domain this week
- Look up who answers for your domain. Search for a free nameserver lookup tool, type your domain, and read the names that come back.
- If the names are a company you do not recognise, find out who it is and what it is used for before anyone changes anything. It might be an old designer, a booking tool or a club platform.
- Know where your email records live. If your email sits with a business email service, those records have to be in whichever address book is the real one.
- Make sure you hold the login. The owner of the business should be able to get into the domain account. It is the same ownership rule as in who owns your Google Business Profile.
The short version
If you change DNS and nothing happens, do not keep editing the same page. Check who your nameservers belong to first. The setting you are changing may not be the one anyone reads.
This is one of the steps in my website launch checklist. If you have a new site waiting to go live, or a domain you are not sure about, book a free call and I will look at it with you.