Moving Business Premises? Your Website Still Sends Customers to the Old Door

The armchair turned up at the wrong house on a wet Tuesday morning. A customer had loaded it into her boot, typed the upholsterer's name into her phone and followed the directions to a bungalow down a Leitrim back road, where the upholsterer's mother answered the door and explained, not for the first time that month, that the business had moved to a unit on the industrial estate weeks ago.

That upholsterer is a composite rather than one real business, stitched together from the stories owners tell me on sales calls when they start thinking about a new website. Every piece of it has happened to someone. The move itself went well. New sign, bigger workshop, Google listing updated the same week. What nobody touched was the footer of the website, the map on the contact page, the pin in Apple Maps and the address on the flyers still pinned up in the hardware shop.

Most customers rang ahead. Some did not. One drove away from the bungalow, assumed the business had shut and gave the job to someone in the next town. Another left a review describing the wild goose chase. None of that ever shows up as a cost on a spreadsheet, which is precisely why owners underestimate it.

Your Old Address Is Living in Places You Forgot

When you move premises, you change the address you think of as the address. Your business actually has several, scattered across systems that never talk to each other, and each one is read by a different person at a different moment. Customers check the website before they set off. Google reads it too. Apple Maps is what an iPhone user or a car dashboard follows, and the flyer is read by whoever picked it up in March.

So the job is not one update. It is four groups of updates, each with its own timing.

Where the old address lives	Who reads it	When to change it
Your website (footer, contact page, map, hidden code)	Customers checking before they travel, and Google itself	Move day
Google Business Profile	Anyone searching your name or your trade nearby	Move day, once you can verify at the new door
Apple Maps and other listings	iPhone users, car dashboards, Facebook visitors	Move day
Paperwork, print and registers	Suppliers, couriers, the CRO, anyone holding an old flyer	The week of the move

Every one of those rows has caught out an owner I have spoken to. The website row catches out the most, so start there.

Your Website Is the Copy Google Checks Against

Most owners treat their Google listing and their website as two separate things. Google does not. Its own help pages say Business Profile information comes from several sources, including crawled content from a business's official website, licensed data from third parties and facts contributed by ordinary users ^[1]. A footer still showing the old address is not a harmless leftover, then. It is evidence, sitting on the one site you control, pointing the wrong way.

Users can suggest edits to your listing, too ^[1]. A helpful customer who copies the address off your contact page and corrects Google with it is doing exactly what the system invites them to do.

The four places it hides on a typical site

• Header and footer. The address on every page. On WordPress it usually lives in a footer widget, a theme settings panel or a reusable block, not on any single page, which is why editing page by page misses it.
• Contact page text and directions. Not just the address line. Turn left after the church, parking at the rear: those describe a building you no longer occupy.
• The embedded map. A map embed is pinned to a location, not to your words. Change the text above it and the map still shows the old place. Replace the embed itself.
• The hidden layer. Many sites carry local business structured data, a block of code describing your name, address and phone number for search engines. On WordPress it is usually set inside your SEO plugin's settings, and nobody sees it unless they go looking.

Why does any of this matter beyond tidiness? Because the customer who checks your contact page at 8am, before loading an armchair into the car, is reading the only version of you that you fully control. Get that version right first. Put the new Eircode beside the address while you are in there, since an Eircode on your website does more work than the address alone.

For a lot of owners, this is where the move stalls. The site was built by an agency or a freelancer years ago, the logins went with them, and changing one line in the footer means emailing a request, waiting for a reply and paying somewhere between €75 and €150 an hour for ten minutes of work. Meanwhile the old address keeps sending people to the old door. I hear a version of this on calls most weeks.

Google Business Profile: Edit the Listing, Then Prove You Moved

Google's instruction is blunt. If you move your business to a new address after it has been verified, you must verify it again ^[2]. That one sentence decides your timing.

Edit the address on your existing profile. Do not create a second listing for the new premises, because a fresh profile starts with no reviews, no photos and no history, and two live listings for one business is a tangle you then have to unpick. Editing keeps everything attached to the profile customers already trust.

Then expect a wait. Google reviews changes before they appear on your profile ^[2], and verifying a moved business can involve showing Google the new premises, so make the edit once the sign is up and the door is open, not a fortnight early. Too soon, and you send customers to a locked unit. Too late, and the upholsterer's mother is answering the door again.

If you close for a few days to move

Plenty of businesses shut briefly for the move itself. Google's guidance here is specific: for closures of seven days or less, set special hours, and use Temporarily closed only for longer gaps, partly because temporarily closed businesses can rank after open ones on broad searches ^[3]. A three-day closure flagged as temporarily closed is a self-inflicted dip at the exact moment you need people to find the new place.

One trap catches relocated businesses in particular. If Google has already marked the old address as permanently closed, that calls for a different fix from an address edit, and it is covered in what to do when Google marks your business permanently closed.

A fair point in the other direction. If you are a mobile trade, a plumber or a dog walker who never meets customers at the premises, Google lets you hide your address altogether ^[2]. For you, the map side of a move barely matters, and the website and paperwork are most of the job.

Apple Maps Wants the Opposite Approach

This one surprises people. Apple's business documentation treats a move differently from Google. Correcting a typo is an edit. A physical move is not: Apple's guidance is to mark the old location as closed with a closing date, create a new location at the new address and wait for it to publish ^[4]. Even a change of unit number counts as a relocation in Apple's eyes ^[4].

That matters because iPhone users who saved your old address, or who navigate through the car dashboard, are working off Apple's data, not Google's. In the upholsterer's story, the customer who drove away from the bungalow had followed Apple Maps. Google was correct by then. It made no difference to her.

Apple Business Connect is where you manage this, and if you have never claimed your location there, a move is a good reason to start. While you are at it, check Bing Places and your Facebook page. Both show an address, and both are somebody's first port of call.

The Paper Trail: Print, Suppliers and the CRO

Not everything with your address on it is online, and not all of it is optional.

If you trade as a limited company and your registered office is moving too, the Companies Act 2014 requires notice of the change to be given to the Companies Registration Office within 14 days ^[5]. Many companies keep their registered office at their accountant's, in which case a move of premises changes nothing there. If yours was the old workshop, though, it does change, and since a company's website has to show its registered office, the footer and the CRO filing should say the same thing within the same fortnight. Your accountant will know which applies to you.

Then the smaller stuff, which adds up quickly:

• Invoice and quote templates, email signatures and booking confirmation emails
• Suppliers and couriers, who will keep delivering to the last address they have
• Local directories, your chamber or trade association listing, and any ad that runs every month in a parish newsletter
• Printed flyers, van livery and business cards

If anything printed carries a QR code, check where it lands. A code pointing at a page on your own domain rather than a rented link service shows the new address the moment you update the page behind it, without reprinting a thing.

Move Week, in the Right Order

Owners who get this right tend to work through it in the same sequence:

1. Audit before you move. Search your own site for the old street name and Eircode, and check the footer, theme settings and SEO plugin as well as the pages.
2. Announce it early. Add a short notice to the home and contact pages saying where you are moving and from what date.
3. Deploy on move day. Update the website, edit your Google listing and start re-verification, and close-and-create on Apple Maps, all on the same day.
4. Verify from a customer's phone. Search your business name on Google and Apple Maps from a phone that is not signed in to your business accounts, and tap through to directions.
5. Keep a forwarding line. Leave a note on the contact page saying where you were formerly based for a few months, for anyone navigating from an old bookmark.

What You Cannot Control

Be honest with yourself about the limits. You decide when your website changes. You do not decide when Google approves your edit, how long re-verification takes, or when the third-party data providers Google licenses information from ^[1] catch up with you. Customers' saved places, screenshots and printed directions never update at all.

That is why the website and the phone carry so much weight during a move. They are the two places a lost customer checks, and the two places you can fix in minutes. For the first few weeks, answer the phone with the new address in your opening sentence. Old-fashioned. Effective.

Owning the Controls Makes a Move Boring

Think about what a sensible setup looks like for a business that will, at some point, move, rename, open a second location or change its hours. You should be able to log in yourself and change any text on any page, footer included, in a few minutes. That change should not depend on a person who has stopped answering emails. The site should run on an open platform rather than a walled garden, so the SEO settings, the map embed and the structured data are all yours to edit. And if something goes wrong mid-edit, you want a backup to fall back on and a human to ring.

Web60 was built to meet that standard. You describe your business and the AI Website Builder produces a full WordPress site in under a minute, on the same software behind roughly four in ten websites, 39.6% according to W3Techs' figures for October 2026 ^[6], though that share has drifted a little over the past year. You get full WordPress access from day one, nightly backups with one-click restore and an Irish support team, for €60 a year with no change-request fees. You can see a Web60 site built in under a minute before you commit to anything. On a setup like that, moving premises becomes an afternoon of edits instead of a fortnight of emails.

To be fair to the competition: if your site sits on a hosted builder like Squarespace and you can already log in and change the footer in two minutes, a move is no reason to switch anything. The move is not the problem. Being unable to make the change yourself is.

Before You Hand Back the Old Keys

A move is one of the few times every customer you have needs the same new piece of information at once. Most will look for it on your website or on a map, and they will believe whatever they find there. Change the website on move day, the listings alongside it and the paperwork that week, then check it all from a customer's phone. Do that, and the only people at the old door will be the ones delivering the post.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I change my business address on Google?

Sign in to your Business Profile, edit the address on your existing listing and save. Google reviews the change before it goes live, and its help pages say a business that moves after being verified must verify again, so make the edit once you are trading from the new premises and be ready to complete verification promptly.

Will I lose my Google reviews if I move premises?

Editing the address on your existing profile keeps the same listing, so its reviews and photos stay with it. Creating a brand new profile for the new premises is what starts you from zero, which is why editing is the better route for a straightforward move.

When should I change the address on my website?

On the day you start trading from the new premises. Before that, add a notice to your home and contact pages saying where you are moving and from what date, so customers checking ahead are not caught out either way.

How do I update my address on Apple Maps?

Use Apple Business Connect. Apple's own guidance treats a physical move as a relocation rather than a correction: close the old location with a closing date and create a new location at the new address. Even a change of unit number is treated this way.

Do I need to tell the CRO when my business moves?

Only if your company's registered office is changing. Under the Companies Act 2014, notice of a registered office change must be given to the Companies Registration Office within 14 days. If your registered office is your accountant's address, a change of trading premises does not affect it. Sole traders should ask their accountant which registrations hold their address.

Should I keep my old address anywhere on my website?

A short line on the contact page saying where you were formerly based helps for a few months, because some customers will navigate from old bookmarks, flyers or saved places. Keep it out of the footer and the structured data, which should only ever show your current address.

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