Discover clear, expert hosting guides at Switchweb to confidently manage your website, domains, and email. Perfect for beginners and experienced users alike.
How to fix “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” when WordPress gets stuck: delete the .maintenance file, finish the interrupted update, and prevent it happening again.
Whether to pay for hosting monthly, annually or several years upfront: what monthly really costs over three years, how to find the renewal price before you commit, who genuinely benefits from monthly flexibility, and how much storage you actually need.
Everything a UK business needs to know about domain names: choosing between .co.uk, .uk and .com, what registration and renewal actually cost, how transfers work, and what to do when a domain expires.
A practical guide to migrating a UK website between hosts without downtime: what to back up, how to handle DNS and email, what order to do things in, and the mistakes that cause outages.
What AI can and cannot do for a UK business website: building sites with AI tools, using AI for content without damaging your SEO, chatbots, and whether to let AI crawlers access your site.
When YOUR website shows “This site can’t be reached” or DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN, the cause is almost always the domain or DNS – expired registration, wrong nameservers, or a deleted DNS zone. Here’s the owner’s diagnosis path.
Lots of Switchweb customers host their website on Wix, Squarespace or Lovable and switch only their email to us for cheap, generous mailboxes. Here’s how to do it, and why it works out cheaper.
How .co.uk domain transfers actually work: what an IPS tag is, how to change it, how it differs from .com auth-code transfers, and how to move registrar without breaking your website or email.
An honest comparison of self-hosted Matomo and Google Analytics 4 for UK websites: data ownership, accuracy under ad-blockers, ease of use, hosting requirements, and who should choose which.
Free ways to identify any website’s hosting provider and domain registrar in minutes, using WHOIS, nameserver and IP lookups – plus what to do with that information if the site is yours.
A practical recovery guide for UK businesses whose web designer has vanished, covering how to find out who controls your domain and hosting, prove ownership, regain access, and move everything into your own name.
A step-by-step checklist for diagnosing 500 errors on Elementor sites, covering PHP memory limits, PHP version compatibility, plugin conflicts, and how to read the error log to find the real cause.
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error on WordPress, covering WordPress address settings, HTTPS redirect loops, Cloudflare SSL modes, and plugin conflicts.
The exact timeline after a .uk or .com domain expires – grace periods, suspension, redemption fees and deletion – plus how to recover an expired domain and stop it ever happening again.
A practical guide to configuring VAT and UK checkout settings in WooCommerce, covering tax rates, digital vs physical goods, shipping zones, and common mistakes to avoid.
An honest comparison of WooCommerce and Shopify for UK small businesses, covering cost, transaction fees, customisation, VAT setup and which platform suits different needs.
A step-by-step guide to fixing Contact Form 7 when emails are not arriving, covering why PHP mail fails, how to set up SMTP properly, and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that keep form notifications out of spam.
A practical look at using AI tools to speed up WordPress content creation, covering useful applications, plugin options, and important caveats around accuracy, quality and SEO.
Should your small business website have an AI chatbot? A practical look at the benefits, downsides, and WordPress setup options for adding chat to your site.
A step-by-step guide to recovering from a hacked WordPress site, covering immediate actions, malware scanning, restoring from backup, and securing your site against future compromise.
A 12-point WordPress security checklist for UK small businesses, covering updates, passwords, two-factor authentication, backups, and ongoing monitoring.
A plain-English explanation of SPF, DKIM and DMARC for small businesses, covering why emails end up in spam, how to check your current setup, and common configuration mistakes.
A plain-English guide to Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) for UK small business websites, covering what each metric means, how to check your scores, and how to improve them without a developer.
A plain-English explanation of DNS for UK business owners: what nameservers and A, CNAME, MX, TXT and NS records actually do, the difference between changing nameservers and changing a single record, why changes take time, and how to work out what has gone wrong when a site or email stops working.
