Yes, in most cases. Your website and your email are separate services that happen to share a domain name. The domain's DNS holds one set of records saying where the website lives and another saying where email is delivered. A new website goes live by changing the web records only. Leave the email records alone and email carries on exactly as before: same inboxes, same passwords, nothing to change on anyone's phone.
Why the website and email can be moved separately
When someone visits your site, their browser looks up the web records for your domain. When someone emails you, their mail server looks up a different record, the MX record, and delivers to whichever servers it names. Neither lookup cares about the other.
So a website move is a matter of knowing which records belong to which service:
| Record | What it does | Change it when the website moves? |
|---|---|---|
| A record for the bare domain (yourbusiness.co.uk) | Points the domain at the web server | Yes |
| CNAME or A record for www | Points www at the web host | Yes |
| MX | Says which servers receive your email | No |
TXT record starting v=spf1 (SPF) | Lists the servers allowed to send email as you | No, unless something new needs to send email |
| DKIM records (TXT or CNAME) | Let receiving servers check your email was really sent by you | No |
TXT record at _dmarc | Tells receivers what to do with email that fails those checks | No |
Records such as autodiscover or mail | Help email apps find their settings | No |
The web host will tell you exactly which values to use for the first two rows. Everything below them stays as it is.
Will my email go down while the website moves?
It should not. Email delivery depends on the MX records, and a website move does not touch them. The only email risk in a straightforward move is someone editing or deleting the wrong record by mistake, which is why the existing records get saved before anything changes.
When it is not that simple
Most moves are as described above. These are the situations where they are not, and every one of them is easy to spot in advance.
Your email is part of the old website hosting package. Many traditional hosting plans include mailboxes on the same account. Moving the website is fine, but cancelling that package would delete the mailboxes with it. Email needs a new home before the old hosting is cancelled, or the package stays.
Someone wants to change the nameservers. Some hosts ask you to point the domain's nameservers at them. That moves every record, email included, to a new provider in one go. It can be done safely, but only if every email record is recreated first. What happens when you change nameservers covers it. When only the website is moving, editing the two web records is usually the lower-risk route.
The new site sends email itself. A contact form that sends through an email service may need adding to your SPF record. A domain can only have one SPF record, so the new service is added to the existing one rather than replacing it. Replacing it is a common way for perfectly good email to start landing in spam.
The old site was made with a site builder. Builders often bundle the website, DNS and sometimes email under one login, so it takes a little longer to see which part is which. We wrote up one of these in Replacing an IONOS Website Builder site while keeping IONOS email.
How we move a website and leave email alone
- Save a copy of every DNS record for the domain before touching anything: an export if the provider offers one, screenshots if not.
- Mark which records belong to email: MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and any mail-related names.
- A day ahead, lower the TTL on the two web records so the change takes effect quickly.
- Change only the bare-domain record and the www record.
- Check the site loads securely on both addresses, then send an email to the business from an outside address and reply to it.
- Keep the old hosting running for a short overlap, and only cancel it once nothing, email included, depends on it.