How to find out where your website actually lives

I typed “how to update my website” into Google this week to see what people actually ask. The suggestions finish the sentence for you:

… on godaddy · on wordpress · on squarespace · on netlify · on github · on instagram

Look at what that really is. Almost nobody is asking how to edit a page. They are asking which system they are in — and they are guessing from a list.

If that is you, you are in enormous company, and it takes about twenty minutes to fix permanently.

There are four things, not one

The reason this gets muddled is that a website is four separate arrangements that most people experience as a single thing:

1. The domain name. You rent it, annually, from a registrar. Nobody “owns” a domain outright.

2. The DNS. The address book that answers “where does this name point?” It can live with your registrar or somewhere else entirely.

3. The hosting or platform. Whatever actually serves the pages.

4. The email. Almost always a different supplier again, and the one people forget until they change something and the email stops.

Our own site, as a worked example, since it would be a bit rich to tell you to check yours without showing mine. The domain is registered with Amazon Registrar. The DNS runs on AWS. The pages are served through CloudFront. The email is at Zoho. Four suppliers, one small company — and that is normal, not a mess. What would be a mess is not knowing.

Finding all four, without asking anybody

None of this needs permission, a login, or a developer. It is all public information about your own name.

Who your registrar is, and when it expires. Registry records used to be looked up with WHOIS; the replacement is called RDAP, and Nominet — who run .uk — have said the old .uk WHOIS is being retired in its favour. You do not need to know any of that to use it. Put this in your browser:

rdap.org/domain/yourdomain.co.uk

It forwards to the right registry and hands back the registrar’s name, the registration and expiry dates, the current status and the nameservers. For a .uk domain you can also go straight to Nominet’s own client at rdap.nominet.uk. Registrant names and addresses only appear where the registrant has agreed to publish them, but the registrar is always visible — and the registrar is the company actually taking your money.

Write down the expiry date while you are looking at it. It is the single most valuable line on the page.

Who runs your DNS. The nameservers in that same result. If they end in awsdns, cloudflare.com, godaddy.com or your host’s name, that is your answer.

Where the pages come from. Any free “DNS lookup” tool will show you what www.yourdomain.co.uk points at. The answer usually names the platform outright — a cloudfront.net, netlify.app, myshopify.com or squarespace.com address is not subtle.

Where the email goes. Look up the MX records for your domain. Ours say mx.zoho.eu, so that is where our post arrives. Yours might say Google or Microsoft. This is a different supplier from your website, and it is the one that breaks when somebody tidies up DNS without knowing what they are doing.

The platform, from the page itself. Open your homepage, view the source, and search for “generator”, “wp-content”, “squarespace”, “wix” or “shopify”. Most systems sign their own work.

Then write the boring page nobody has

One side of A4, or a note in your password manager. For each of the four: the supplier, what it costs, when it renews, which email address the reminders go to, and who has the login.

That last column is the one that matters. Half the time the honest entry is “the person who built it”, and a good proportion of the time that person left in 2019.

The two disasters this prevents

The domain quietly expires. The renewal reminder goes to an address nobody reads any more — often the departed developer’s. The website goes dark, and so does your email, on the same morning. Recovering a lapsed domain is far harder than rebuilding a website, and occasionally impossible if somebody else has taken it.

You cannot change a phone number. Not because it is difficult, but because the only person with access has stopped replying. Every week that goes by, your site is a bit more wrong. If that is where you are, the underlying problem is not the missing login — it is a site only one person can touch, which is the thing worth fixing properly.

What argues the other way

Plenty of businesses put all four with one supplier on purpose, and for a lot of them that is the right call: one bill, one login, one number to ring when something breaks. The trade-off is that leaving becomes harder and a bad day takes out everything at once. Neither answer is wrong; the wrong thing is having ended up with a spread by accident and not knowing it.

And knowing where everything lives is not the same as being qualified to move it. DNS is unforgiving and the mistakes are public. The point of this exercise is not to start editing records — it is so that you can instruct somebody precisely, or change supplier without a fortnight of detective work first.

One related confusion worth clearing up while you are at it: being able to change your own site is not the same as being able to change what Google shows about you, and neither is the same as your Google Business Profile. We pulled those three apart in “how do I update my website on Google?”.

The short version

Four things, four possible suppliers: domain, DNS, hosting, email. Twenty minutes with a browser tells you all four and your renewal date, and none of it needs a password. Write it down once and you will never again be the business that could not update its own opening hours.

Notes on method: every lookup described here was run against our own domain before publishing, so the walk-through is tested rather than assumed. The point that Nominet is retiring the .uk WHOIS in favour of RDAP, and that registrant name and address appear only with the registrant’s consent while the registrar is always shown, is from Nominet’s own registrar documentation. The autocomplete suggestions quoted at the top are what Google returned for “how to update my website” in the UK in August 2026; suggestions change, so yours may differ slightly.