One sentence in FPM Group’s discontinuation notice is doing far more work than most practices have noticed. It sits in the “What This Means for You” section, between two paragraphs about hosting, and it reads:
FPM Group will not provide site updates or support beyond the later of your agreement expiry or 1 September 2026.
Read that again with your own renewal date in mind. For the majority of practices on My Surgery Website, whose agreement expires before next September, it means 1 September 2026 is the day the website stops changing.
Not the day it disappears. MSW hosting continues until 31 March 2027 and patients will carry on reaching your site exactly as they do now. But a site nobody will amend is a different proposition from a site that works. A partner joins in October. A branch changes its phone number. A flu clinic needs listing, an opening hour needs correcting, an accessibility fault needs fixing. From that date, under the terms MSW has published, those stop being things it will do.
Why this has slipped past people
Because the headline number is 2027, and 2027 sounds like a problem for another financial year. Almost all the discussion of the MSW wind-down, including our own earlier write-up, has treated 1 September as a domain administration deadline and 31 March 2027 as the real event.
The notice does not read that way once you take it line by line. Three separate things attach to that same September date or follow from it, and only one of them is about domains.
| What the notice says | What it means for your practice |
|---|---|
| No site updates or support beyond agreement expiry or 1 September 2026, whichever is later | For most practices, the site is frozen from that date. Still online, still hosted, but no longer maintained |
| Written notice required by 1 September 2026 saying where your domain should transfer | Miss it and the transfer happens without your instruction, to a provider named in the notice |
| Customer information shared with the “Proposed Provider” | Your practice contact name, email and phone number are passed on so that provider can approach you |
The default, if you say nothing
Your practice domain is the address printed on repeat prescriptions, saved in patient bookmarks, linked from the NHS website and indexed by search engines. Where MSW administers it, the notice asks for an instruction by email to support@mysurgerywebsite.co.uk before 1 September 2026 naming who it should move to. Absent that instruction, the notice states plainly:
If we do not hear from you by 1 September 2026, we will transfer your organisation’s domain name to The GP Website Company Ltd.
FPM Group describes that firm as an independent third party it is aware of, notes that any engagement would be “separate and independent from FPM Group and subject to separate terms”, and says it does not guarantee the availability, scope or suitability of what any third party offers. That is FPM Group’s own framing, not ours, and it is worth taking at face value: being the default is an administrative arrangement, not an endorsement, and it says nothing either way about whether that provider suits your practice. Whoever you land with, ourselves included, should have to earn it, and we have written separately on what to ask a prospective provider.
Your details may have moved already
Several practice managers have told us they were contacted about replacement websites before they had approached anybody. The notice explains why. Under “Customer Information and Patient Personal Data” it confirms FPM Group holds contact names, email addresses and telephone numbers, and states:
To assist with the transition of the services to the Proposed Provider, FPM Group will share your customer information with the Proposed Provider, so that the Proposed Provider can contact you about the provisioning of similar services.
No date is attached to that sharing, so it may already have happened. Patient data is handled differently and more favourably: where FPM Group processes patient data on your behalf, the notice says you can have it sent to yourself or to a provider of your choosing, with a download link and support on using it provided on request. If that applies to you, ask for it in the same email as your domain instruction rather than treating it as a separate task for later.
What fits in the time left
Written on 17 August, that leaves fifteen days. It is enough, provided the first item happens this week.
- Dig out the agreement and find the expiry date. That one date decides whether your support ends on 1 September or later, and nothing else can be judged without it.
- Confirm in writing whether MSW administers your domain. Not every practice on the platform is in that position, and assuming either way is expensive.
- Send the domain instruction to support@mysurgerywebsite.co.uk before 1 September, and keep a copy. If you have not settled on a new provider, you can still direct that the domain move to the practice’s own control and decide afterwards.
- Request any patient data held on your behalf in the same message.
- Take your own copy of the site now, while it is still maintained. Content, images, staff list, policies. Whoever builds the replacement will want all of it. If you would like a read on how the current site is performing before it freezes, our free website audit scores it against NHS England’s benchmarking tool, WCAG 2.2 and CQC readiness.
What does not fit into that window is choosing a supplier properly, briefing them and having a new NHS GP practice website built. That is fine. Those are separate jobs on separate clocks, and the September date does not force them.
If it would help to talk
We are independent of My Surgery Website and FPM Group, and have built and supported websites for NHS GP practices since 2009. We administer the domain transfer ourselves as part of a move rather than handing the practice a job to do.
Our My Surgery Website transition page sets out what a managed move involves and counts down to the September date. If you would simply like a second opinion on what your agreement says, ask us for that instead. Nothing is conditional on becoming a customer.
Dates, quotations and default arrangements above are taken from the discontinuation notice published by FPM Group, correct at the time of writing. Your own agreement governs your practice’s position, so read it before acting on any of this.
