How do I switch dealership website providers?

In this order: read your cancellation clause and note the deadline; export your inventory, photos, leads and URL list while your account is still active; confirm the domain is registered to the dealership; have the new provider build the site at a temporary address; proof it and test a lead; lower your DNS TTL, then point the domain at the new site; watch it for 48 hours and repoint your feeds; and only then send written cancellation to the old provider, inside its notice window. The site never goes offline, because the old one stays live until the domain is repointed.

Will I lose my Google rankings if I change dealer website providers?

Usually not, if you keep the same domain. Ranking authority attaches to the domain much more than to individual pages, and a rebuild on the same domain typically causes a one-to-three-week wobble followed by recovery. Set up 301 redirects from your old page URLs to the new equivalents, resubmit a sitemap in Search Console on cutover day, and check the new vehicle pages carry proper structured data. Moving to a brand-new domain, or onto a provider's shared subdomain, is what genuinely costs rankings.

Can I keep my domain name when I switch providers?

Yes, if the domain is registered in the dealership's name — check this at the registrar before you do anything else. If your current provider registered it on your behalf, request a transfer authorisation code in writing while you are still a paying customer. Some providers are slow here: BBB complaints about Carsforsale.com cite domain releases being reviewed only quarterly. Owning the domain yourself costs about $12 a year and makes this and every future switch straightforward.

How long does it take to switch dealer website providers?

About a week of actual work: a day to export, a day or two to build and proof, a day for the DNS cutover, and a couple of days of watching before you cancel. The calendar is usually set by your contract rather than by the build — if your term auto-renews and requires 30 days' written notice, start three to four weeks before that deadline.

What if I am still under contract with my current provider?

You can still build and cut over; you simply keep paying out the remaining term. Check whether fees are refundable before you assume otherwise — Dealer Car Search's terms state 'in no event will we issue any refund of fees,' and AutoManager's say 'all sales are final and no refunds will be given.' Two months of overlap on a $250 bill is normally cheaper than another full year on a platform you have already decided to leave.

Will my website go down while I switch?

Not if you cut over in the right order. The new site is built and tested at a temporary address while the old one keeps serving your domain; the only moment anything changes is the DNS update, and with the TTL lowered to five minutes beforehand that propagates in minutes. If something looks wrong you change the DNS record back. Sites go dark when a dealer cancels the old provider first — that is the one step that is not reversible.

What does it cost to switch to Shopframe?

$0 setup. Plans are $29/mo Lite (up to 15 units, self-serve), $149/mo Starter (up to 50 units), $299/mo Growth (unlimited units, done-for-you edits) and $499/mo Pro, all month to month with no contract. Optional white-glove migration is $999 and is included free on annual plans. You can build your site and see your exact price before giving us an email address.

SShopframe

How to switch dealer website providers without going dark.

Most dealers who want to leave their website provider do not leave, and it is almost never because they changed their mind about the product. It is because nobody told them the order of operations — so the switch feels like a risk to the one thing the lot cannot afford to lose. Here is the whole sequence, the contract clauses that decide your timing, and what to get out before you cancel anything.

Last updated 8 September 2026 · Written by Shopframe, a dealer website platform — we are one of the options at the end, and the guide above it works whoever you switch to.

The short answer

Switching dealer website providers takes about a week, and the site never has to go offline — because the new site is built, proofed and live at a temporary address before the domain is pointed at it, and the old provider is not cancelled until after the cutover has held for a couple of days.

The part that actually costs dealers money is not the build. It is timing the cancellation. Several of the largest providers use auto-renewing terms with a 30-day cancellation window and non-refundable fees, so a notice sent a day late renews the whole term. Read your cancellation clause first, before you shop, and work backwards from it.

The two assets you must control before anything else: your domain name, registered in the dealership's name, and a current export of your inventory, photos, and lead history. Own those and no provider can hold the switch hostage.

Disclosure, up front: Shopframe sells dealer websites, so we obviously want you to switch to us. That is exactly why this page is written to be useful if you switch to someone else — the checklist, the cutover order and the contract quotes are provider-neutral, and every competitor quote below is from that company's own published terms, linked at the bottom. The Shopframe-specific part is fenced off in section 5 and you can skip it.

1 · Read your cancellation clause before you shop

This one clause decides your entire timeline. Find it first — it is usually in the order form or the online service agreement, not on the marketing site.

Four things to look for, in this order: (a) does the term auto-renew, and how many days before renewal must notice be given; (b) does notice have to be in writing, and to which address; (c) are any fees refundable; (d) how long after the term ends can you still retrieve your data. Here is what the published terms of four widely-used providers actually say.

Provider	Term	Cancellation	Refunds	Your data afterwards
Dealer Car Search	Auto-renewing Order Form	Only 30 days before renewal	"In no event will we issue any refund of fees"; remaining-term fees accelerate on breach	Not published
DealerCenter	Term auto-renews	Fee increases permitted on 30 days' notice	Not published	Retrievable 30 days post-term — and only if the account is paid in full
AutoManager	Monthly	One month's written notice	"All charges are non-refundable unless expressly stated otherwise"; "All sales are final and no refunds will be given"	Not published
Carsforsale.com	Month-to-month, published	Published as cancel-anytime; BBB complaints cite hard-to-cancel billing	Not published	BBB complaints cite domain releases reviewed only quarterly
Shopframe	Month to month	From your account page, before renewal — no phone call, no notice period	Published refund policy	Your photos, leads, customer data and any domain you own remain yours

"In no event will we issue any refund of fees."— Dealer Car Search terms of service

"All charges are non-refundable unless expressly stated otherwise, or otherwise provided by law." · "We may change the price of the Services without prior notice."— AutoManager online service agreement

What this means in practice: if your provider auto-renews annually and needs 30 days' written notice, the switch has exactly one hard deadline in it and everything else is flexible. Put that date on the wall, then start the build three to four weeks ahead of it. If you have already missed the window this cycle, that is not a reason to stay another year — build the new site now, cut over when it is ready, and let the old term run out unrenewed.

Every quote above is from the provider's own published terms; sources are linked at the foot of this page. Verified August 2026 and itemised line by line on our provider comparison page. Terms change — if one of these is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.

2 · Get these seven things out before you cancel anything

Every one of them is easy while you are still a paying customer, and difficult-to-impossible the day after you are not.

1 · The domain, in your nameLog into the registrar and confirm the registrant is the dealership, not the website provider. If the provider registered it for you, ask for a transfer authorisation code in writing now. This is the single most common thing that traps a dealer.

2 · An inventory export (CSV)Every provider can produce one. Get stock number, VIN, year, make, model, trim, mileage, price, and your description text. A VIN list alone is enough to rebuild from, but the descriptions you wrote are worth keeping.

3 · Your photos, at full resolutionNot the thumbnails the site displays — the originals. Hundreds of walkaround photos are real money to re-shoot. If there is no bulk download, ask support for one before you give notice.

4 · Lead and customer historyNames, numbers, emails, and what they asked about. This is your follow-up list and your marketing list. Export it even if you think you will never open it again.

5 · Your live URL listGrab your sitemap.xml, or crawl the site, so you know which vehicle and page URLs Google currently knows about. You need this to set up redirects and keep the rankings you already have.

6 · Access to your own Google propertiesGoogle Business Profile, Search Console, Analytics. If the provider set them up under their own account, get yourself added as an owner now — losing the Business Profile hurts a used-car lot far more than losing a website.

7 · A list of every place your inventory feedsMarketplace, Craigslist, third-party listing sites, your DMS. Each one needs pointing at the new site after cutover, and forgetting one is how a lot ends up with two live versions of its own price.

3 · The cutover order that keeps you online

The rule is simple: nothing gets turned off until the replacement is proven. In a normal week it looks like this.

Day 0 — Find your cancellation deadlineRead the clause from section 1. Write the date down. Everything else fits around it.
Day 1 — Export everything in section 2Do this while your account is fully active and support still answers you as a customer.
Day 2 — Build the new site at a temporary addressYour new provider stands the site up on their subdomain or a staging URL. Your real domain is untouched and your current site is still serving customers, exactly as it was this morning.
Day 3 — Proof it like a customer, not like an ownerOpen it on a phone. Check the phone number, the hours, the address, the financing disclaimer, and ten random vehicles against the lot. Submit your own lead form and confirm the lead actually arrives.
Day 4 — Lower your DNS TTLAt your registrar, set the TTL on the site's records to 300 seconds. Do it a day ahead so the internet has already forgotten the old value by the time you switch. It turns a cutover that could take hours into one that takes minutes.
Day 5 — Point the domain at the new siteChange the DNS record. Both sites still exist; only one is answering on your domain. If anything looks wrong you change the record back and you are exactly where you started — this is the step that makes the whole switch reversible.
Day 6–7 — Watch, then repoint your feedsConfirm leads are arriving and https is valid, then update Google Business Profile, Marketplace, Craigslist and any third-party feeds to the new URLs.
Day 8 — Now cancel, in writing, inside your windowOnly once the new site has held for a couple of days. Keep a copy of the notice and the date you sent it.

Three rules that prevent every bad switch we have seen

Never cancel first. A cancellation confirmed before cutover can take the old site down the same day, and the gap between "old site off" and "new site live" is the only way a lot actually goes dark.
Never let the new provider own your domain. Bring your own, registered to the dealership. If you need a new one, buy it yourself, at any registrar, for about $12 a year. It is the one asset that makes every future switch easy.
Keep paying the old provider until the new site has held for 48 hours. One extra month of an old bill is cheap insurance against a rollback you cannot perform because the account is already closed.

4 · Keeping the Google rankings you already have

The fear is reasonable, the outcome is usually fine, and three things decide it.

Keep the same domain. Ranking authority attaches to the domain far more than to the pages on it. A dealer who keeps their domain and rebuilds the site on it typically sees a wobble for one to three weeks and then recovers. A dealer who moves to a new domain — or worse, onto a provider's shared subdomain — starts over, and that is a genuinely expensive decision.

Redirect the old URLs. Your vehicle detail pages will almost certainly have different URLs on the new platform. Give your new provider the URL list from section 2 and ask for 301 redirects on the pages that had traffic — your inventory landing page, financing, about, contact, and anything that ranks. Individual sold-vehicle pages matter much less; those were always going to expire.

Re-verify Search Console and resubmit a sitemap on the day of cutover, so Google recrawls quickly instead of discovering the change on its own schedule. And check that the new vehicle pages carry proper structured data — that is what produces the price and mileage detail in search results, and it is an engineering choice some cheap platforms get right and some expensive ones get wrong.

One honest caveat: if your current site ranks poorly, switching will not fix that by itself. Rankings follow site speed, crawlable inventory, correct per-vehicle markup and genuinely unique page content. A new platform can give you those; it cannot give you authority you never had.

5 · What switching to Shopframe specifically looks like

The part where we are not neutral. Stated plainly, including what we do not do yet.

Send the inventory export you already haveCSV from any DMS. Shopframe maps common export headers, and vehicles can also be added by VIN. There is no setup fee and no migration project to schedule — optional white-glove migration is $999 and is included free on annual plans.
Approve the new look before anything changesYou build it yourself in the configurator and see the finished site, and the exact monthly price, before you give us an email address or a card. Your existing site stays exactly as it is throughout.
We coordinate the domain connection when you are readyAny domain you own stays yours. Self-serve domain connection is not available yet, so a person on our side coordinates the cutover with you — nothing changes on your domain until you say go.

Worth knowing before you pick us

Plans are month to month at $29, $149, $299 and $499, $0 setup, cancellable from your account page, and the published price is the whole bill — the full market breakdown is on what a dealer website actually costs. Two things we deliberately do not claim: automatic DMS feed sync is not available today (CSV import and VIN quick-add are), and Craigslist posting is not automatic — the builder produces ready-to-paste titles, descriptions, photos and form fields for manual posting. If either is a requirement for your lot, better you know it now than after the switch.

Want the switch mapped out for your lot?

Tell us who you are with now and we will send back a plain-English switch plan — your likely cancellation window, what to export, and a cutover date that keeps you online. No card, no sales call, and it is useful even if you stay where you are.

Questions dealers actually ask before switching

How do I switch dealership website providers?: In this order: read your cancellation clause and note the deadline; export your inventory, photos, leads and URL list while your account is still active; confirm the domain is registered to the dealership; have the new provider build the site at a temporary address; proof it and test a lead; lower your DNS TTL, then point the domain at the new site; watch it for 48 hours and repoint your feeds; and only then send written cancellation to the old provider, inside its notice window. The site never goes offline, because the old one stays live until the domain is repointed.
Will I lose my Google rankings if I change dealer website providers?: Usually not, if you keep the same domain. Ranking authority attaches to the domain much more than to individual pages, and a rebuild on the same domain typically causes a one-to-three-week wobble followed by recovery. Set up 301 redirects from your old page URLs to the new equivalents, resubmit a sitemap in Search Console on cutover day, and check the new vehicle pages carry proper structured data. Moving to a brand-new domain, or onto a provider's shared subdomain, is what genuinely costs rankings.
Can I keep my domain name when I switch providers?: Yes, if the domain is registered in the dealership's name — check this at the registrar before you do anything else. If your current provider registered it on your behalf, request a transfer authorisation code in writing while you are still a paying customer. Some providers are slow here: BBB complaints about Carsforsale.com cite domain releases being reviewed only quarterly. Owning the domain yourself, at a registrar of your choosing, costs about $12 a year and makes this and every future switch straightforward.
How long does it take to switch dealer website providers?: About a week of actual work: a day to export, a day or two to build and proof, a day for the DNS cutover, and a couple of days of watching before you cancel. The calendar is usually set by your contract rather than by the build — if your term auto-renews and requires 30 days' written notice, start three to four weeks before that deadline.
What if I am still under contract with my current provider?: You can still build and cut over; you simply keep paying out the remaining term. Check whether fees are refundable before you assume otherwise — Dealer Car Search's terms state "in no event will we issue any refund of fees," and AutoManager's say "all sales are final and no refunds will be given." Two months of overlap on a $250 bill is normally cheaper than another full year on a platform you have already decided to leave, but do the arithmetic with your real numbers.
How do I get my inventory out of my current website provider?: Ask support for a CSV export of your active inventory — every provider can produce one, and it is a routine request while your account is in good standing. Get stock number, VIN, year, make, model, trim, mileage, price and your description text. Separately, request a bulk download of your original full-resolution photos, which is the part dealers most often lose. Do both before you give notice, not after.
Will my website go down while I switch?: Not if you cut over in the right order. The new site is built and tested at a temporary address while the old one keeps serving your domain; the only moment anything changes is the DNS update, and with the TTL lowered to five minutes beforehand that propagates in minutes. If something looks wrong you change the DNS record back. Sites go dark when a dealer cancels the old provider first — that is the one step that is not reversible.
What does it cost to switch to Shopframe?: $0 setup. Plans are $29/mo Lite (up to 15 units, self-serve), $149/mo Starter (up to 50 units), $299/mo Growth (unlimited units, done-for-you edits) and $499/mo Pro, all month to month with no contract. Optional white-glove migration, where we do the export and rebuild for you, is $999 and is included free on annual plans. You can build your site and see your exact price before giving us an email address.

Sources for the contract language above: dealercarsearch.com/terms-of-service · automanager.com online service agreement · automanager.com/pricing · dealercenter.com general terms · dealercenter.com/pricing · dealers.carsforsale.com/pricing-demo. Verified August 2026 and itemised on our provider comparison page; pricing context on what a dealer website costs. Competitor names and terms are referenced for factual comparison only. Providers change their terms — if something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.