The short answer: the domain matters more than the website. A website can be rebuilt in days; a lost domain takes your address, your email and your Google history with it. Work in this order: find out who the registrant is (a free lookup at the Domain Name Commission), get it transferred to you through your registrar if it’s in the designer’s name, secure the registrar login and turn on auto-renew, then recover or rebuild the site. Then set it up so it can never happen again: the domain in your name, from day one.
First, find out what you actually own
Every .nz domain has a registrant, the domain name holder. The Domain Name Commission (DNC), which oversees .nz, puts it plainly: the registrant is “the party that is responsible for the domain name’s registration information being up to date, as well as having control over the domain name.” Not the person who built the website. Not whoever paid the last invoice. The registrant.
So the first ten minutes are a lookup, not a phone call. Search your domain at dnc.org.nz and read the registrant field. Three outcomes:
- It’s you or your company. Good. You own the address; you just need access to it.
- It’s the designer, their company, or the registrar. The DNC’s guidance is exact: “If the registrant that is listed is your web developer or your domain name provider (registrar), you will need to contact your registrar to get this transferred to the correct individual / organisation.”
- It’s expired or about to. Time matters now; skip to the expiry section.
The DNC says it receives “numerous requests from entities that claim to be the owner of the domain, but the domain is instead showing a different registrant”. You are not the first, and there is a process.
Case 1: you’re the registrant but the designer holds the login
The domain is yours; the registrar account is the lock. Contact the registrar (the company the domain is registered through, which the DNC lookup names) as the registrant, prove who you are, and ask them to move the domain into an account you control, or to a registrar of your choice. Registrars deal with this every week.
Once it’s in your hands: your own contact email (the DNC recommends not using an address on the domain itself, because that goes down with the domain), a strong password, two-factor login, and auto-renew on.
Case 2: the designer is the registrant
This is the common, uncomfortable one. It usually happens innocently: the designer registered it in their own account “to keep things simple” and never handed it over. The fix is a change of registrant. The DNC publishes a guide to it and invites you to contact them if you have issues with the process.
Practically:
- The polite route first. Email the designer asking them to change the registrant to your company name and hand over the registrar login, or to start a transfer to your registrar. Many will, promptly, once asked in writing.
- Then the registrar. If there’s no reply, contact the registrar with evidence the domain is used by your business (invoices, the company name on the site, your NZBN) and ask what they need to correct the registrant.
- Then the DNC. If you’re stuck, the DNC’s “Manage my domain name” guide links to its change-of-registrant process and a contact form for exactly this.
Keep every message in writing. Don’t threaten; document.
If the domain has expired
When registration lapses, a .nz domain goes into a redemption period. The DNC’s guidance: the registrant has “90 days to reinstate the domain name before it is made available to register by the general public again”, and reinstating “may be expensive and can be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”, with your website and email down meanwhile. Two consequences: act inside the 90 days, and once it’s back, turn on auto-renew, because the DNC notes it’s “very hard to guarantee that your registrar will notify you of an expiring domain”.
If the 90 days have passed and someone else has registered it, you’re negotiating for your own name. That’s a bad place to be; a new domain and a plan to tell customers is often the saner answer. Choosing that new name properly is its own short job.
Now the website
The website is the easier problem, which surprises people.
- Your content is the asset. Your words, your photos, your logo. Get them off the live site now, while it’s still up: save every page as a PDF and download the images. If the site lives on a builder under the designer’s account, you may never get the account, and that’s usually fine.
- Rebuilding is often faster than recovering. A one-page site for a local business is a days-long job, and a rebuild is the moment to fix everything that was wrong with the old site anyway. Here’s the 20-minute prep list.
- Point the domain at the new site. Once the domain is in your hands, changing where it points is a five-minute settings change at the registrar. Search engines follow.
- Email. If your email runs on the domain, plan the move so mail doesn’t stop. That’s the one part of this to do carefully rather than quickly.
Never again: the ownership rules
- The registrant is your company, in your company’s name, at your address.
- The registrar login is yours, with two-factor turned on and a contact email that isn’t on the domain.
- Auto-renew is on. Renewal invoices come to you.
- Whoever builds your site gets access to point the domain, never to own it.
- You keep a copy of your content at launch and after every big change.
InternetNZ’s 2025 research found 74% of NZ businesses consider a .nz address more trustworthy than other domains; that trust is worth protecting like the asset it is.
This is how LaunchPad is set up on purpose: the .co.nz is registered in your name from day one, we cover the renewals while you’re subscribed, and if you ever cancel, the domain and your content go with you. Sites are plain static files, so any host can serve them. The full ownership answers are here, and the plan is $1 a day, $365 + GST a year ($419.75 incl. GST), with the build free during launch. The one-minute registrant check above is worth running before any new provider gets started, ours included.