The Website Succession Plan Your Business Does Not Have

A family-run plant and tool hire business in Co. Kildare, second generation, the best part of forty years in the same yard. The founder came off a ladder in February and spent six weeks in hospital. His daughter had been running the hire desk for years, so the counter kept moving, the vans kept going out, and the invoices kept issuing. The website did not move at all.

Nothing had been hacked. Nothing had expired. The site sat there, live, serving the same pages it had served the week before, and she could not change a single word of it.

That business is a composite. I have put it together from the pattern we see often enough in migration requests that I can usually sketch it before the call is over, and I was reviewing three of them this week. Every element in it has happened to somebody. The names have not, because there are no names.

The First Thing That Broke Was Not the Website

Owners never predict this part. The website itself was the last thing to cause trouble, because a WordPress site with hosting paid up will happily serve pages to strangers for months without a human being anywhere near it.

What broke was everything hanging off it.

The enquiry form on the contact page delivered to the founder's personal Gmail. It had always delivered there, since the site was built, because that was the address the person who set it up happened to use. So did the domain renewal reminders, along with the notifications from the payment provider and the alerts from the plugin that handled the hire booking calendar.

The yard closed for a fortnight while the family sorted out cover. The Google listing kept telling anybody who searched that the business was open until half five.

A trade customer looking to hire a mini digger filled in the form on a Tuesday morning and heard nothing back. He rang once. Then he rang somebody else. Nobody in the family knew that enquiry had ever existed, because the only inbox it landed in was sitting in a locker beside a hospital bed. That is the shape of the loss in a situation like this: not a dramatic outage anybody can point at, just quiet, unattributable erosion, work walking past an open gate for six weeks.

The daughter did the sensible thing. She rang the person who built the site, eleven years earlier. That business no longer existed.

"We Are the Family" Is Not an Argument Google Has to Accept

This is where it stops being an IT problem and starts being a legal one, and where most owner-run firms discover the rules for the first time.

Every platform your business depends on has a contract with a person, not with your business. The Google account is the founder's. The Business Profile is verified against that account. The Meta Business Manager, if there is one, sits under a personal Facebook login. The domain registration lists whoever filled in the form. None of these are corporate assets in the sense a solicitor would recognise. They are personal accounts with your business's livelihood hanging off them.

So when the family goes to Google, the answer is not the one they expect. Google's own help pages for a deceased user's account are explicit that it cannot provide passwords or other login details, and that if you ask for the account to be closed, it will not later hand over the contents. Meta is blunter still. Its business help centre states that for privacy reasons it will not even reveal who the admin of a Business Manager is, which means a family can be locked out of their own page and be told, correctly, that the identity of the person holding the key is confidential.

That is not a platform being awkward. Neither company can hand a stranger the keys to somebody's email on the strength of an assertion, and you would want exactly that protection for your own account. But it does mean the argument that settles everything else in a family business, we are the family, carries no weight whatsoever here.

There is one route back, and it is worth knowing before you need it. For a Google Business Profile, anyone can submit an ownership request. The current owner then gets an email and has three days to respond, and if nothing comes back, the requester may get the option to claim or verify the profile themselves ^[1]. Three days sounds fast until you remember that the email lands in the inbox nobody can open.

The Difference Between Six Weeks and Forever

That business got lucky, in the sense that anybody who spends six weeks in hospital gets lucky. The founder came home, opened his laptop, and the problem evaporated in an afternoon.

The permanent version does not work like that.

When the account holder dies, the accounts do not pass to whoever needs them. They pass into an estate, and the estate is administered by a personal representative whose authority comes from a grant of probate. In Ireland that takes real time. The Courts Service publishes its current position openly, and as of the end of August it had personal applicants facing a ten to twelve week wait just for an appointment with the Dublin Probate Office, with applications lodged by solicitors through the online portal running at roughly three to four weeks once they are in, assuming no queries arise ^[2]. Regional district registries run their own timelines again.

None of the clocks that matter to your website pause while that happens.

A .ie domain is the sharpest example. The registry auto-renews domains on the renewal date and takes the fee from the registrar's account, but where that fee goes unpaid, the domain is suspended on the forty-fifth day after the renewal date and expires completely on the eightieth ^[3]. Eighty days. On a straightforward estate that is comfortably inside the window before anyone has legal authority to touch a bank account, never mind a hosting invoice. If your domain lapses, your website, your email, and every link anybody has ever built to you go with it, which is a slower and much more expensive version of what happens when a business simply forgets to renew.

Is this rare? Less rare than the sector likes to think. Roughly nine in ten of the 401,359 active enterprises the CSO counted in 2023 were micro businesses employing fewer than ten people ^[4], and in a business that size the owner and the person who set up the website are almost always the same human being.

The accountancy firm ifac, in its first Family Business Report this year, put the share of Irish family businesses with no succession plan at around six in ten, based on survey work by Amárach Research ^[5]. Treat that as an indicative figure from one firm's own research rather than an official statistic, but it matches what I hear on calls. Most owners have thought hard about who gets the business. Almost nobody has thought about who gets the logins.

What That Business Actually Changed

The fix is not technical. It took the family an evening and cost them nothing beyond the price of paying attention, and the sequence matters more than the tools.

They started by writing down what actually existed, which took longer than expected and turned up two accounts nobody remembered opening. If you have never done this, the same exercise that lets you audit who still holds a login to your website works here, run in the opposite direction: not who has access they should not have, but which assets have exactly one person who does.

Then they moved the ownership, one asset at a time:

• Domain and hosting into the business name rather than an individual's, with a second named contact on the account who can be verified independently.
• The enquiry email off the founder's personal Gmail and onto a business address that more than one person in the business can reach. Wherever that mailbox lives, the rule is the same: no revenue-generating message should arrive in an inbox with one key.
• A second owner on the Google Business Profile. Not a manager, an owner. Managers cannot promote themselves, and only the primary owner can transfer primary ownership, so a business with one owner and three managers is still a business with one key.
• Google's Inactive Account Manager switched on for the founder's personal account. It is free, most people have never heard of it, and it lets you nominate up to ten trusted contacts who are notified and given a download link for chosen data after a set period of inactivity ^[6]. It is not a full handover, but it turns a locked door into a conversation.
• Verified backups, with somebody other than the owner knowing where the restore button is. Automatic nightly backups are only half the job if one person knows how to use them, which is the part covered properly in our full WordPress security and backup guide.

I got this wrong myself with a client a couple of years back. They had a shared password document and I told them that was fine. It was fine, right up until the office manager who maintained it moved on and took the habit with her. I should have asked who owned the document, not just whether one existed.

Where This Is Genuinely Not Your Problem

Some businesses have already solved this and do not need any of the above.

If you are big enough to run a proper identity platform, with a super-admin account that belongs to the organisation rather than to any individual, single sign-on across your services, and delegated administration handled by an IT provider who documents it, then enterprise managed hosting with role-based access genuinely handles this better than any small-business platform will. The whole problem becomes a provisioning question. That setup is worth real money to a firm of that size and I would not talk anybody out of it.

But it is priced for a firm of that size, and it presumes an IT function. For a hire yard, a dental practice, a two-van locksmith or a shop with four staff, the answer is not a platform. It is an evening, a written record, and a second named human being.

The Part No Platform Can Fix for You

Being straight about the limits here matters more than the pitch.

Web60 can restore your website. If the site is deleted, corrupted, or broken by a bad update, nightly backups and one-click restore will put it back, and our support team is in Ireland and answers the phone. What Web60 cannot do, and what no hosting provider can honestly claim, is restore your Google account, your Meta Business Manager, or your payment provider's dashboard. Those live with the platforms that issued them and they answer to their own processes. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

Two other honest caveats. A written access record decays the moment somebody changes a password and forgets to update it, and a stale record is worse than none because it creates false confidence. Put a reminder in the calendar twice a year and verify it properly rather than glancing at it. And second, adding a named secondary contact to an account is only possible where your provider supports it, which many cheap resellers do not, so check before you assume.

Where this does connect back to hosting is in who you are dealing with when the worst happens. A family trying to prove authority over a business asset needs a provider with a real support desk, records in the business name, and a human being in the same timezone who will actually pick up. That is the practical argument for hosting run on Irish infrastructure with a support team you can ring, rather than a ticket queue eight hours behind you. If you are setting up a site from scratch, put the account in the business name on day one and you never have to unpick it.

Conclusion

The founder in Kildare recovered. Most of the accounts have a second pair of hands on them now, and the enquiry form goes somewhere the whole family can see. What changed was not their technology. Somebody simply wrote down what the business owns and who else can reach it.

That document takes an evening. It does not need a solicitor, a consultant, or a new platform, and it is the cheapest insurance in the building. If nobody in your business other than you can currently log into your own website, that is the one thing worth doing before the month is out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens to my business website if I die?

The website keeps running for as long as the hosting and domain are paid. Control is the problem, not uptime. The accounts pass into your estate and can normally only be dealt with by a personal representative acting under a grant of probate, which takes months in Ireland. Meanwhile the domain renewal clock keeps running, and a .ie domain expires eighty days after its renewal date if the fee goes unpaid.

Can my family get into my Google account if something happens to me?

Not directly. Google will not release passwords or login details for a deceased user's account, though immediate family or a representative can apply to have it closed, and in some cases to receive content after review. The better option is to set up Inactive Account Manager in advance, which lets you nominate trusted contacts who receive chosen data automatically after a period of inactivity you choose.

How do I add a second owner to my Google Business Profile?

In your Business Profile settings, open "People and access", add the person, and set their access level to Owner rather than Manager. Only the primary owner can transfer primary ownership, so do this while you still have access. A new owner or manager also has to wait seven days before they can use every feature, which is another reason to set it up long before you need it.

Should the domain be registered to me or to my company?

To the business, in almost every case. Registering a domain to an individual means it forms part of that person's estate if they die, which drags a working business asset through probate. It also complicates any future sale. Registering it to the company or registered business name, with a business email as the contact address, avoids both problems.

What should a website handover record actually contain?

The domain registrar and who the registrant is, the hosting provider and account holder, the WordPress admin logins, the email account that receives enquiries and renewal notices, the Google Business Profile primary owner, any social accounts, the payment provider, and any plugin or service on a separate subscription. For each one, note who else can currently get in. Store it somewhere at least two people can reach, and re-verify it twice a year.

Is this different for a sole trader and a limited company?

Yes, and sole traders are more exposed. A limited company is a separate legal person, so assets registered to the company stay with the company even when a director dies. A sole trader is the business, so anything in that person's name goes into the estate. If you trade as a sole trader, getting accounts into the registered business name and adding a second contact matters more, not less.

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