Selling Your Business? The Website Is the Part Nobody Checks

A family hardware and agricultural supplies shop in Mayo agreed a sale this year, after more than three decades of the same family behind the counter. Two vans, a yard, a customer list that goes back to before anyone had heard of email. Price agreed over two meetings and a handshake. Then the buyer's solicitor sent across the due diligence list, and on the second page, sitting quietly between the lease and the insurance renewals, was a line asking the seller to confirm ownership of the company website and domain name.

That line held the sale up for five weeks.

The shop is a composite, assembled from handovers I have been pulled into over the years, because no owner wants their name attached to this particular story. The sequence is real enough that I could name four businesses it has happened to.

The Question Nobody Can Answer on the Spot

The owner's answer, when I rang him about it, was the answer I hear every time. "Sure the lad who built it looks after all that."

He was not being careless. He built a business that worked. Somebody set up the website in 2012, an invoice for it lands every January, he pays it, and the site has done its job without complaint ever since. Why would you go looking for a problem?

What the solicitor was asking is a narrower question than "do you have a website". It is: can you hand it over. Those are different things, and most owner-operators discover the difference at the worst possible moment.

Scale explains why this catches so many people. The Central Statistics Office counted 401,359 active enterprises here in 2023, and micro enterprises, the ones with fewer than ten people, made up 92.6 percent of them. Call it nine in ten businesses running without an IT department or anyone whose job it is to keep a register of what the business owns online. Writing on RTÉ Brainstorm in July, Oliver Browne of University College Cork made the point that a large cohort of founders who started out in the eighties and nineties are now reaching retirement with no obvious successor lined up. Every one of those businesses will eventually put its digital assets in front of a solicitor.

Five Accounts, and Not One of Them in the Owner's Name

When we sat down and listed what the shop's website actually consisted of, we found five separate things, held by four different parties.

• The domain registration. The registrant on record was the web designer's own limited company, not the shop.
• The hosting account. In the designer's name too, on a reseller account, billed onward to the shop each January.
• The WordPress administrator login. Two admin accounts, one belonging to the designer and one to a staff member who had left in 2019.
• The Google Business Profile. Claimed years earlier using a personal Gmail address that the owner's daughter had set up.
• The email addresses on the domain. Configured by the designer, with the mailbox passwords stored in his password manager.

None of that was sinister. It is simply what happens when a busy person delegates a job they do not enjoy. But a buyer is not buying a website. A buyer is buying the address that thirty years of customers, suppliers and Google searches point at, and if you cannot prove you control that address, you cannot sell it. This is the practical reason who actually owns your business website matters long before anybody talks about selling.

The commercial consequence arrives quickly. A buyer who cannot get a clean answer does one of two things. They chip the price, on the basis that they will have to rebuild and re-earn the search visibility themselves. Or they slow the deal down while solicitors write letters, and a deal that slows down can go cold. Neither is a website problem. Both come out of the seller's number.

The .ie Rule That Can Cancel a Domain Mid-Sale

This is the part that gets sharper than most owners expect.

A .ie domain is not a possession you own outright and post to someone. It is a right to use, granted under the registry's rules, and changing the name on it is a formal process. The IE Domain Registry sets out what it needs when a domain moves as part of a business deal: a signed declaration on headed paper from the current registrant or administrative contact, confirming that the change is happening as part of a transaction to buy, take over, restructure or merge a business. An incoming holder must also demonstrate their own connection to Ireland and prove their identity under the registration policy, and new administrative contact details have to be supplied.

Then comes the line worth reading twice. The registry's guidance says those steps should be completed at the same time to avoid the possibility of the domain being cancelled.

Sit with what a cancelled domain means mid-handover. The website stops resolving. Every email address on that domain stops accepting mail, so purchase orders, supplier statements and customer enquiries all bounce, in the exact fortnight a new owner is trying to reassure everyone that nothing has changed. Recovery is not a phone call. It is a fresh registration, a fresh eligibility check, and a spell where the business is contactable only by phone.

Two other details matter for planning. A registrant transfer can only be processed by your existing registrar, so if that relationship runs through a third party who is not answering emails, there is your bottleneck. And the registry is explicit that it will not be liable if the sale falls through. There is no referee. The onus sits with the seller.

Thirty Years of Reviews Can Be Deleted in Ten Seconds

The Google Business Profile is the asset owners undervalue most, and it is the one I would fight hardest for.

For a shop like this, the profile is the front door. Opening hours, phone number, photographs and, critically, years of reviews from local customers. Nobody can buy that. It has to be transferred, and Google's documentation is specific about how.

Transfer primary ownership to the new owner and the business information, including the reviews, is maintained. Only the current primary owner can make that transfer. The person receiving it has to already be an owner or manager on the profile, so you cannot hand it to a stranger in one step, and anyone newly added has to wait seven days before they can manage everything.

Where it goes wrong is the shortcut. Faced with a login nobody remembers, the temptation is to start a fresh profile for the new owner and move on. That new profile launches with zero reviews. Thirty years of local goodwill, gone in the week the new owner most needs proof that the business is the same business, replaced by a blank page and a request to be verified.

Worth being honest about the limits, though. Even a clean transfer has friction built into it. That seven day wait is real, so leaving the profile until completion day means the new owner spends their first week unable to change the hours or respond to a bad review. And a transfer does not rewrite history: reviews that praise the previous owner by name stay exactly as they are, which is usually a gift, but occasionally an awkward one.

What Sorting It Out Actually Looked Like

The fix took a fortnight of email, not a legal battle.

The designer, when finally asked directly, was entirely cooperative. Most are. He signed the declaration, his registrar processed the registrant transfer, and the domain came across into the company's name. We moved the site onto a hosting account billed to the business itself. His former staff member's administrator account was removed, a new one created on an address the owner controls, and the daughter, still the primary owner of the Google profile, added the buyer as a manager a fortnight before completion so the seven day wait had elapsed well before she handed primary ownership across.

The sale closed, and the buyer kept the website, which is what the seller wanted, because the alternative valuation conversation was not going to be pleasant.

I will admit my own part in how these situations arise. Years ago I told an owner not to bother chasing his domain registration, because the designer who held it was decent, responsive and had never let him down. All of that was true. He also emigrated. It was never a question of trust, but of what happens when someone becomes unreachable, which is a different risk entirely and not one you can assess by how much you like them.

A clean setup is not complicated, and it does not depend on who you host with. The domain registered to the business. Hosting billed to the business. An administrator account on an address the owner personally controls. The Google profile owned by the business, with a second person as manager. And one page in a drawer saying where each of those things lives and who to ring. That is the whole standard, and any provider worth paying should meet it without being asked.

It is the standard Web60 was built around, because the platform exists for the owner-operator rather than for an agency holding the keys on their behalf. The site, the hosting, the backups and the dashboard logins sit with the business from day one, everything included for €60 a year, with your own domain connected to it. When the day comes to hand the business on, there is no third party to chase, because there was never a third party in the middle. The same logic applies to hosting arrangements that are easy to enter and expensive to leave.

Where the Old Arrangement Is Genuinely Fine

Not every business needs to act on this today, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

If you are winding down rather than selling, if the business is you and it stops when you stop, then the tangle costs you nothing. Let the domain lapse and the file closes itself. Equally, if your website is a single brochure page any buyer would replace in their first month, the domain name is the only asset in the list worth arguing over, and paying somebody else to hold the rest is a rational trade for the years in between.

There is also a scale at which this genuinely belongs to somebody else. A business with an in-house IT function and a proper asset register does not need an article about it; that handover is already someone's job description, and full-service providers manage that class of transfer well. The gap is in the middle. It is the ten person firm with a good website, a strong local reputation and no register of who holds what.

The Afternoon That Protects the Price

The uncomfortable thing about all of this is that the work is trivial and the timing is not. Getting the domain into your own name, adding yourself as an owner on your Google profile and writing down where the accounts live is an afternoon. Doing it under a solicitor's deadline, with a buyer's patience running out, is five weeks and a weaker negotiating position.

You do not need to be selling for it to be worth an afternoon. The same list protects you if a designer retires, if a laptop dies, or if you simply want to move to a provider you like better. Whether you hand the business on in two years or twenty, somebody will eventually ask you to prove the address is yours.

Better to find out the answer on a quiet Tuesday than on page two of a due diligence list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my website transfer automatically when I sell my business?

No. The sale agreement can oblige you to transfer it, but nothing moves by itself. Domain registration, hosting account, website logins and Google Business Profile are held under separate accounts with separate providers, each with its own process for changing hands. If those accounts are in somebody else's name, that person has to cooperate for the transfer to happen at all, which is why the first step is finding out whose name is on each of them.

Who owns my .ie domain if my web designer registered it in their name?

Whoever is listed as the registrant holds the right to use the domain, and if that is your designer's company, it is not yours to sell. Most hand it over without argument once asked. The IE Domain Registry has a defined process for moving a domain as part of a business transaction: a signed declaration on headed paper from the current registrant, proof of the incoming holder's connection to Ireland and their identity, and new administrative contact details. It can only be processed through the existing registrar.

How do I transfer a Google Business Profile to a new owner?

Add them as an owner or manager on the profile first, then change their role to primary owner. Only the existing primary owner can do this, and Google requires anyone newly added to wait seven days before they can use all the management features, so start it well before completion day rather than on it. Transferring primary ownership keeps the business information and reviews intact.

Will the new owner lose all our Google reviews?

Only if somebody deletes the profile and starts a new one, which is the most common and most expensive mistake in a handover. Google's guidance is clear that transferring primary ownership maintains the business information, reviews included. A fresh profile starts empty and has to be verified from scratch, so a business with years of local reviews can look brand new in search results at exactly the wrong moment.

Does changing owner damage the website's Google rankings?

Changing the name on a domain registration is an administrative record change and does not, by itself, affect how the site ranks. Damage happens when a handover turns into a rebuild: pages disappear, addresses change and nothing is redirected. If the new owner also intends to trade under a different name, that is a bigger job where sequencing matters, as our guide to changing your business name without losing your search rankings sets out.

What should I ask my web designer for right now?

Four things, in one email. Whose name the domain is registered in, whose name the hosting account is in, an administrator login created against your own email address, and owner access on your Google Business Profile. You are not accusing anyone of anything by asking, and a good provider will answer the same day. One who cannot answer within a week has told you something useful.

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