A community club website usually fails at handover, not at build. The domain, the hosting, the site login and the Google account sit in one volunteer’s name, and that volunteer has moved on. The five jobs a club site has to do are small, and the running cost is under $250 a year. The accounts behind those jobs are the fragile part, and no committee writes them down.
The season starts in six weeks. Registrations open on Monday. The training times on the website are two years old and nobody can change them.
The person who built the site did it as a favour. A parent, a committee member, or a friend of the president. They have since moved on. The domain renews on an expired card. Nobody knows which inbox the hosting invoices go to.
A community club website has five jobs. Everything else is optional, and optional things are what future volunteers end up maintaining.
Say who the club is for and how to join. Age groups, fees, when the season runs, and what a new family should do first.
Publish times and venues that are correct this week. Training nights, home ground, and what happens when a game is called off.
Send people to registration. Your league or state body usually mandates the platform, whether that is PlayHQ, revolutioniseSPORT or another. The site links to it. It does not rebuild it.
Keep sponsors visible. Logos, links, and a page you can put in front of a sponsor at renewal time.
Give contact details that survive a committee change. A role-based email address, not somebody’s personal one.
Volunteers are often told a club needs everything a business has. It does not. These get built, then abandoned:
A news blog. Someone posts three times in March and never again.
A members-only area. Members log in once, forget the password, and email the secretary instead.
An app. The league usually has one already, and a second one goes unused.
A photo gallery. It fills with photos from one good season and never gets sorted.
Anything that takes money the registration platform already takes. Two payment paths means two sets of records to reconcile.
Every feature is a job somebody has to do next year. Adding one spends another volunteer’s spare time.
Keeping a small club website running in Australia costs roughly $100 to $250 a year, before anyone’s time. Most of that is the domain and the hosting. Figures checked August 2026.
| The job | The simplest thing that does it | Cost to keep running each year |
|---|---|---|
| The club’s web address | A .com.au, .org.au or .asn.au domain registered to the club | About $20 to $25 at the major Australian registrars |
| Keeping the site online | Shared Australian hosting with an SSL certificate included | About $60 to $180 |
| Joining details, times and venues | A few pages a volunteer can edit without help | Nothing beyond the hosting |
| Registrations and payments | The platform your league or state body mandates | Set by the governing body, often charged per registration |
| Club email addresses | Mailboxes on the club’s own domain, included with most hosting plans | Usually nothing extra |
| Showing up on Google Maps | A Google Business Profile with more than one owner | Nothing |
One detail catches clubs out. A .org.au address is reserved for not-for-profit entities. Under auDA’s rules an unincorporated association is not eligible unless it appears on the ACNC charity register. Unincorporated clubs can use .asn.au instead. If your club renews a .org.au held in a member’s name, check it before the next renewal.
<a href="”>Four accounts decide whether a club website survives a change of committee: the domain, the hosting, the website login and the Google account. Each can be held in a way that transfers, or a way that does not.
The domain. Register it to the club’s legal name and ABN, not to a volunteer. auDA ties eligibility to the registrant, so a domain held personally becomes a problem at renewal.
The hosting. Put it on an account with a club email address and a club payment method. A card in a former treasurer’s name is a common reason a club site goes dark.
The website login. At least two current committee members should have their own administrator login. A shared password cannot be revoked when someone leaves.
The Google account. Google requires an existing owner to add you as an owner before ownership transfers. If the old owner has left and does not reply, the club cannot take the profile back.
Add the second Google owner while there is still someone to ask. It is the step that gets skipped.
An incorporated association in Victoria has 14 days to fill a vacant secretary role. It has no deadline at all for the website, which is why the website is what gets lost.
Consumer Affairs Victoria requires a Victorian incorporated association to fill a secretary vacancy within 14 days, and a departing secretary loses myCAV access. Other states have equivalents. The regulator built a handover into that role. Nobody built one into the website.
Sometimes the accounts cannot be recovered. If the domain has lapsed and been taken, or the only administrator is unreachable, start again on a domain the club owns outright. That is cheaper than a year of chasing.
Yes, but not in the way most clubs set one up. Google’s guidelines say a business showing an address should keep permanent fixed signage of its name there. A club training on a council reserve does not control that signage, and the reserve is usually already on Maps as its own place.
Two honest options:
The club has a clubroom it controls, with its own sign. List that address and set hours for when the clubrooms are open.
The club has no permanent premises. Set the profile up as a service-area business and hide the address. That is Google’s own guidance for a business with no storefront and no clear signage.
One profile per club. Do not create a separate one for every ground you play at.
Hours are the other trap. Google says businesses with varied schedules should generally leave hours off. A club with four age groups training on four nights is better off putting the timetable on the website.
A club website that only matters twice a year still has to be right on those two occasions. Registration week and the first round are when people arrive, and both land at the same time every year.
Google’s guidance for seasonal operations is to set regular hours during the season, mark the profile as temporarily closed in the off-season, then set the hours again when the club returns. That is a two-minute job, twice a year, forever. It is exactly the kind of job that dies with a committee.
The quiet months are when the maintenance happens:
Renew before the reminder. Put the domain and hosting renewal dates in the club calendar, not just in one person’s inbox.
Test the contact form from outside the club. Send one from a personal address and check it arrives, spam folder included.
Update the committee page. New names, new email addresses, old ones removed.
Check the registration link. State bodies change platforms and links break without anyone being told.
Every club already has one annual moment when roles change hands and paperwork gets lodged: the annual general meeting. Add one page to that agenda and the handover stops depending on memory.
Keep it with the club’s records, not on a volunteer’s laptop. It should name:
A committee that hands over that page hands over a working website. A committee that does not hands over a guess.
If your club has reached the point where nobody can log in, the first job is working out what it still controls, then getting the rest back in the club’s name. CJ Digital can do that and keep the site running afterwards, so the next committee inherits something that works. Start at cjdigital.com.au/contact-us/.
A club’s domain name should be registered to the club itself, using its legal name and ABN. auDA’s licensing rules tie .au eligibility to the registrant entity, so a domain held in a volunteer’s personal name can become a problem when that person leaves. Incorporated associations can hold a .org.au address. Unincorporated clubs generally cannot, unless they are on the ACNC charity register, and should look at .asn.au instead.
Work out what the club still controls before spending any money. Check who the domain is registered to using auDA’s .au whois lookup, then ask the hosting provider what its account recovery process is. If the domain has lapsed and been registered by someone else, the practical answer is a new domain in the club’s name and a fresh site. Chasing an unreachable former volunteer usually costs more in time than a rebuild costs in money.
Yes, for the things the platform does not do. Registration platforms handle memberships, fixtures and payments under the governing body’s rules, and a club rarely gets to choose which one it uses. They do not tell a new family what the club is like, keep sponsor logos in front of people, or give a stable contact point for the committee. The website covers what happens before someone reaches the registration link.
Yes, and more than one person should. A profile can have several owners and managers. Google requires an existing owner to add a new owner before ownership can be transferred, so a club with a single owner is one resignation away from losing control of its listing. Adding a second owner takes a few minutes and needs doing while the current owner is still contactable.
Twice a year is enough for most clubs, plus one check before registrations open. Look at the training times and venues, the committee contact details, the registration link, and whether the contact form still delivers to an inbox someone reads. Note the domain and hosting renewal dates in the club calendar so a lapsed payment never takes the site down mid-season.
