How to Switch Council Website Provider

Last updated 10 October 2026 · By Alex Wood

Moving your council website to a new provider can feel daunting: years of minutes, a domain name you did not set up yourself, and email that must not stop working. Planned properly, it is straightforward, and residents should notice nothing except a better website. This guide walks through each step.

1. Check Your Current Contract

Before you approach anyone new, find out where you stand with your current supplier:

• When does the contract renew, and how much notice do you need to give?
• Who owns the website content, design and documents?
• Can you get a full export of pages and files, and is there a charge for it?
• Is your domain name or email tied to the current supplier’s account?

Some council website platforms are proprietary, which means the site itself cannot be moved, only its content. That is fine, as long as you can get the content out.

2. Take Control of Your Domain Name

Your domain name, such as yourparish-pc.gov.uk, is the most important thing to get right. Make sure the council is the registered owner, and that the clerk can log in to wherever it is managed, or knows who can. Changes to a .gov.uk domain go through a registrar approved for .gov.uk. Our guides to moving to a .gov.uk domain and choosing a domain name explain the options.

3. Protect Your Email

If your council email addresses use your domain, they depend on DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC) that sit alongside your website settings. When the website moves, those records must be copied across exactly, or email can stop arriving. Ask for a copy of your current DNS settings before anything changes, and make sure your new provider checks email on launch day.

4. Audit Your Content

A move is the best chance you will get to tidy up. Work through your current site and decide what to:

• Keep: meeting papers, statutory information and anything residents use
• Rewrite: pages that are out of date or unclear, or information buried in PDFs that would work better as web pages
• Archive or remove: old news, duplicate pages and documents nobody needs

Check too that everything your council must publish online is in place: Transparency Code information, audit documents, your accessibility statement, privacy notice and councillors’ registers of interests.

5. Plan the Migration

Agree with your new provider exactly what will be moved and how. For most councils the biggest job is the meetings archive: years of agendas, minutes and papers that need to land in the right place, correctly named and dated. Ask how documents will be organised, who checks them, and what will happen to any that are not accessible.

6. Redirect Old Addresses

Every page on your current site has an address that Google, residents’ bookmarks, your district council’s website and old social media posts point to. If those addresses stop working after the move, visitors hit error pages and your council can drop out of search results. The fix is a redirect map that sends each old address to the matching new page. Make sure it is part of your provider’s plan, because it is one of the most commonly missed steps.

7. Check Accessibility Before Launch

A new website should meet WCAG 2.2 AA from day one, including the content and documents you have migrated. Update your accessibility statement for the new site, with a fresh test date.

8. Train Your Editors

Make sure your clerk, and anyone else who updates the site, is trained before launch rather than after. The first few weeks after a new site goes live are when good habits form.

9. Launch Day Checks

• Switch the domain to the new website at a quiet time, and check it loads with and without “www”
• Send a test email to and from council addresses
• Submit the contact form and check the message arrives
• Try a handful of old addresses to confirm the redirects work
• Submit your new sitemap in Google Search Console
• Check that your cookie banner and analytics are working

10. After Launch

• Ask your district or borough council to update the link to your website in their list of parish councils, and do the same with your county association
• Update links on social media profiles, noticeboards and newsletters
• Check Google Search Console over the following weeks for pages Google cannot find, and add redirects where needed
• Cancel the old hosting only once you are sure nothing is still being served from it

How Long Does It Take?

It depends mostly on how much content you have. A small parish council with a modest archive can move quickly, while a town council with several committees and years of papers needs longer. The design and build is rarely the slow part. Gathering content and decisions is.

Moving to Zonkey

We design and build your new site and migrate all of your content from your existing platform, including your meetings archive. If you are weighing up suppliers, read how to choose a council website supplier and things to consider when replacing your council website, then request a quotation or call 01225 667 977.