Owner Questions
My Business Email Stopped Working After We Changed Websites
The new website went live on Monday. By Wednesday, customers are saying their emails to you bounce, or the quotes you send are landing in their spam folders, or your inbox has gone strangely quiet. Nobody touched the email. So why did it break?
Because your website and your email share one thing: your domain name. Moving a website almost always means changing the domain's settings, and if those changes aren't made carefully, email is the first casualty. This guide explains what those settings are, what usually goes wrong, and how to fix it, without assuming you've ever looked at them before.
The domain is the switchboard
Think of your domain name as a switchboard. When someone visits yourbusiness.com, the switchboard directs them to your website's server. When someone emails you@yourbusiness.com, the same switchboard directs the email to your mail provider. The website and the email can live with completely different companies; the domain's settings, called DNS records, tell the world where each one is.
Those records are managed in one place, usually at the company you registered the domain with, or wherever the settings were moved to. When a website moves, someone changes the records that point to the website. If they replace the whole set of records, or move the domain's settings to a new company without copying everything over, the email records disappear with the old ones.
The four records that matter for email
You don't need to edit these yourself, but knowing what they do makes the conversation with whoever does much easier.
- MX records say which company receives your email. If these are missing or wrong, email sent to you bounces or goes nowhere. This is the cause when 'nobody can email us'.
- SPF is a list of the services allowed to send email as your domain: your mail provider, your booking software, your invoicing tool, your website's forms. Mail from anything not on the list looks suspicious to the receiver.
- DKIM adds a digital signature to every message you send, so the receiver can check it really came from you and wasn't altered. Your mail provider gives you the record to publish.
- DMARC tells receiving providers what to do with mail that fails the SPF and DKIM checks, and can send you reports about who is sending as your domain.
Since 2024, Google and Yahoo have required bulk senders to have these authentication records in place, and Microsoft has introduced similar rules for high-volume senders to Outlook addresses. A small business sending ordinary email is below those thresholds, but the direction is clear: mail from domains without proper authentication is treated with growing suspicion.
What usually goes wrong
- The MX records were deleted. The new web host or designer moved the domain's settings and only recreated the website records. Incoming email stops entirely.
- The MX records now point to the new web host. Some hosts include email in their plans and set the records to their own mail service, even though your mailboxes are with Google or Microsoft. Mail arrives somewhere you never look.
- SPF was overwritten or duplicated. A domain can only have one SPF record. Adding a second one for the new website's forms, instead of adding the new service to the existing record, breaks both.
- DKIM didn't come across. The signing record from your mail provider wasn't copied, so your sent mail is no longer signed and starts landing in spam.
- Nothing broke yet, but will. DNS changes take time to spread, so problems can appear a day or two after the switch, when everyone has stopped looking.
How to check where things stand
Free online lookup tools will show your domain's MX, SPF and DMARC records if you type in the domain. Google's Admin Toolbox and similar services from other providers will check them and explain any problems. Your mail provider's admin console usually has a page showing whether the domain is set up correctly and which records are missing.
A quick test also tells you a lot: send an email from your business address to a personal Gmail account and, in Gmail, open the message and choose 'Show original'. It will say whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed. If any say 'fail' or are missing, that's what needs fixing.
How to fix it
The fix is to put the right records back, which takes minutes once you know what they should be:
- Get the correct MX, SPF and DKIM values from your email provider's help pages or admin console. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both publish exactly what to enter.
- Make sure there's one SPF record, listing every service that sends email for you.
- Add a DMARC record, starting in monitoring mode so nothing is blocked while you check the reports.
- Allow up to a day or two for the changes to spread, and test again.
If you didn't make the change yourself, ask whoever moved the website to restore the records. A competent web professional will know exactly what you mean.
How to avoid it next time
Before any website move, take a copy of every DNS record on the domain: a screenshot or export from wherever they're managed. That one step makes almost every email problem after a move a five-minute fix instead of a frantic week. Then make sure the person moving the site knows where your email lives and agrees not to touch those records.
It's also worth confirming that you hold the login to the domain's settings yourself, in your own name, as we explain in who really owns your website. If your email is down and only a former designer can reach the settings, a small problem becomes a big one.
When we take over or rebuild a site, our practice is to record the existing DNS settings before changing anything, leave email records untouched, set up authenticated sending for the website's own forms (the reason we explain in contact forms that don't send), and test both incoming and outgoing mail after the switch. If your email has gone strange since a website change, get in touch and we'll help you work out what moved.
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