Of the twenty Houston firms we prepared to call in September 2026, two had a website that no longer loaded. Both were still listed on Google. When we then ran a registration lookup on 36 domains from the wider shortlist, we found one domain that had lapsed and was sitting on registrar hold, two that Google still listed but nobody owned at all, and two within eleven days of expiry.
Neither firm knew. There is no alarm for this. The renewal reminders went to the email address the web designer used in 2017, the card on file expired, and the site went dark. Search engines and directories do not notice. They keep citing the address for years, and every person who follows it gets an error page and calls the next name on the list.
The two-minute check
- On your phone, on cellular data, type your domain into the browser. Try it with “www” and without.
- If you see your site, good. If you see a registrar’s page (“this domain may be for sale”, “parked”), an error, or nothing, keep going.
- Go to lookup.icann.org and enter the domain. Write down three things: the expiration date, the registrar, and the status line.
The status line tells you how much trouble you are in.
What the status means
ICANN’s expired-registration rules give every .com, .net or .law domain roughly the same life after expiry.
| Status you see | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| ok, expiry date in the future | It is yours. The site is down for another reason: hosting lapsed, DNS changed, builder subscription ended. | Call whoever built it, or the host. Renew hosting. |
| clientHold or autoRenewPeriod | Expired, still yours. Registrars may hold it up to 45 days. | Log in to the registrar and renew today, at the normal price. |
| redemptionPeriod | Deleted, but ICANN requires a 30-day window in which only you can restore it. | Restore through the registrar. Expect a fee well above a renewal. |
| pendingDelete | The 30 days are over. In about five days anyone can register it. | Be ready to register it the moment it drops, or move on. |
| No match / not registered | Nobody owns it. | Register it now, in the firm’s name, before someone else does. |
| Registered to someone else, recently | It dropped and a reseller or another business took it. | Do not pay a squatter first. Choose a new domain and update every listing. |
ICANN requires registrars to send two reminders before expiry, about a month and a week ahead, and one after, but they go to the email on the registration. If that address is the old designer’s, the reminders were sent and nobody read them. That single fact explains most dead law-firm domains we found.
The order to fix things in
First hour.
- Renew or restore the domain if you can. Choose the longest term on offer and turn on auto-renew.
- Change the registrant email to an address the firm actually reads, and add a second contact. Put a calendar reminder a month before the new expiry date anyway.
- If the domain is gone and a new one is the answer, register it in the firm’s name, from the firm’s own account. Not the designer’s, not the nephew’s.
Same day.
- While the site is dark, open your Google Business Profile, remove the dead link from the Website field, and make sure the phone number is correct. A listing with no website button loses people; a listing whose button leads to an error page loses more.
- Update the address everywhere else that lists you: the state bar profile, Avvo, Justia, Yelp, Facebook, your email signature and letterhead. Search your phone number in quotes to find the ones you forgot.
This week.
- Get a site back on the domain. It does not need to be the old one. A page for the firm, a page for each thing you do, the phone number on every page, working on a phone. If the domain is new, ask whoever builds it to redirect the old one if you still control it.
What it is costing you
We do not have a number for your firm, and we distrust the ones vendors quote. What we can say from the sample: the firms whose domains had lapsed or been dropped had between forty and eighty Google reviews each, with ratings between 3.8 and 4.8. People were finding them. Every one of those people who tapped the website button got an error and went back to the results. The reviews did the work and the dead link threw it away.
If you would rather hand it off
We check the domain, the listing and the directories before we ever speak to a firm. If the site is dark, we register or restore the domain in your name, and have a new site live on it in seven days, with the listing fixed and every missed call texted back within a minute. That is the whole offer, and the first conversation is fifteen minutes.
Sources and methodology
- Scope
- Written for independent US firms. The expiry and recovery rules described are ICANN's for generic top-level domains such as .com, .net and .law; country-code domains such as .us have their own registry rules. This is not legal advice about domain disputes.
- How this was produced
- Built from a September 2026 review of 490 Houston law firms on Google Maps, a hand check of the twenty firms we prepared to call, and a registration lookup on 36 firm domains from the shortlist. That lookup found two domains Google still listed that nobody owned, one on registrar hold with the site dark, and two within eleven days of expiry.
- 5 things every domain name registrant should know about ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery PolicyICANN
- FAQs for registrants: domain name renewals and expirationICANN
- Edit your Business ProfileGoogle Business Profile Help
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