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Domain migrations

Migrating domains can be a big operation. It’s almost like moving into a new house, taking along all the piles of stuff you’ve cluttered over the years. You’ll need to sift through every small part of your website, organize it, and make sure it ends up at the right spot in the new place. A challenging business. Especially for big companies with large websites and numerous pages. 

Useful resources for domain migrations:

Migrating domains can sometimes be necessary. But there is a lot at stake. Mismanagement of the process will lead to errors and can cause a major loss of traffic. Fortunately, there is a way to do this properly.  

Explore our handy guides on how to migrate your website or emails to a different domain.

What is a domain migration? 

Domain migration means that you’re moving a website from one domain to another. This involves moving data from one system to another without losing critical information and maintaining security. You need to migrate all of your content and resources of the website to a new location. 

This might make you wonder, what makes domain migration different from website migration? 

What is the difference between a domain and website migration? 

When migrating domains, you switch from domain names, which automatically means that all the content of your website needs to be moved to the new domain. Website migration is a more general term. It’s used to describe the process of making big changes to a website’s tech, structure, design, name, or location. 

What is domain redirection? 

With domain redirection, you forward one domain to another. This means you’ll need to redirect every single URL on the one domain to the right URL on the destination domain. So you’ll set up many URL redirects at once. This is done when the domain name of a website is changed. Or, for instance, with mergers and acquisitions. Domain migration is a big operation, and many things can go wrong. Managing a domain migration properly is essential to minimize your risk of traffic loss or problems with your website’s reachability. 

Reasons why you’d want to migrate to a different domain

Maybe the domain name you’ve always dreamed of has suddenly become available. Or you’ve convinced the previous owner to sell it to you. These can be good reasons for changing your domain name and migrating to a new domain. But some other situations call for a domain migration. 

Perhaps you want to expand your value proposition to make it broader and give your brand a complete makeover. This could mean your original brand is no longer a fit. You’ll need a fresh brand name, with a fresh design. Migrating domains will be a necessary part of this.

The merging of two companies comes with a whole new identity. This often means that a brand-new domain name is needed. And content from both legacy domains must be redirected and migrated to the new domain.

It’s always a possibility that, even with the best intentions, your domain name infringes on someone’s intellectual property. Perhaps you find out at a later point that it’s protected by copyright. If this happens, you should change your domain name and migrate domains to prevent legal issues.

Risks associated with domain migrations 

Migrating domains will affect pretty much all your traffic to the website. The direct visits, but also the referrals from links on other websites, channels, or social media. All internal and external links pointing to your old domain will turn up as broken links if they’re not properly redirected. This could lead to serious traffic fluctuations. 

Changing domain names can also greatly affect your SEO authority, also referred to as page rank. You’ll experience decreased organic visibility, which can have serious consequences for revenue and ad spending. 

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to simply ‘transfer’ your rankings from one domain to another. Since you’ll be changing the URL of every page, Google will have to recrawl, re-evaluate, and reindex each page. And this will take a while. However, if the domain migration is done right, with the proper redirects, your numbers will return to the level before the domain migration within a few weeks.

Your old domain also still holds link equity from backlinks, which in turn impacts page rank. To limit the impact, make sure these are forwarded to the new domain after your domain migration.

Technical issues during the domain migration, for instance with server configurations, DNS settings, or SSL certificates, can disrupt the functioning of the website. And the loss of data is also a risk during domain migration. You can lose data such as files, databases, user accounts, and content. That’s why it’s essential to make proper backups to mitigate this risk. 

This problem can arise when your domain is tied to email services. During or after domain migration, email communication can get disrupted, leading to bounced emails and undelivered messages. 

When users experience problems during or after the domain migration, such as security warnings or broken functionality, they can lose trust in your website or services. You’ll want to avoid this at any cost. Because this is how a poorly executed migration can damage your brand’s reputation. 

How to implement a domain migration

To avoid the risks that can lead to traffic loss or damage to your brand, the domain migration must be done smoothly. But how do you do this? And where do you start? 

Don't worry, we’ve got you covered. Here, we’ll go over all the important steps, and show you how redirect.pizza can help. 

  1. 1

    Step 1: Assess everything that needs to be migrated

    This is a critical step. You’ll need to assess everything that needs to be migrated to the new domain. Start by making a complete list of URLs on your existing domain. You can do this by crawling your website like a search engine to find all the URLs in Google's index. ‍

     

    This list of URLs will later be utilized to set up redirects and assess the success of your redirects and the site's performance after migration.

     

    Another important thing to do is to make a list of all your subdomains and tools installed on your site to get a better picture of what needs your attention. If you’re not sure whether you can remember all of them, there are some tools you can use to dive ‘em up, such as Google Search or Pentest tools.  

  2. 2

    Step 2: Prepare and migrate all content on your site

    To prepare for a migration of your entire website content, make sure you first make a backup of your old website. Keep the old website live during the migration process.

     

    Make a copy of the content live on the URLs that you’ve assembled in the list in step 1. Include things like the SEO copy (meta title and description), headings, body copy, images (with properties like alt text), links, etc.‍

     

    Then it’s time for the actual domain migration. This usually means you’ll have to connect your new domain name to your CMS. 

     

    During and after the domain migration, you’ll want to preserve your domain's SEO authority as much as possible, without disrupting accessibility and user experience. That’s why creating redirects is so important. This brings us to the next step…

  3. 3

    Step 3: Create a redirect list

    When changing domains, you’ll need to reroute all the traffic from your old domain to your new domain. This is done with redirects, and it is a crucial step! But how do you properly redirect a website to another domain? To set up the proper redirects, you’ll need to start with creating a comprehensive inventory.

     

    This means you’ll need the list of URLs from your old domain that you’ve assembled in step 1. But you’ll also need to make a list of all URLs that will be part of your new domain. 

     

    Once you’ve completed your inventory, you can compare and organize the structure of your redirects. It’s important to match and redirect URLs from one domain to their closest counterparts of the destination domain.

  4. 4

    Step 4: Set up redirects

    Setting up and implementing domain redirects can be done manually on your own hosting solution, but that requires quite some expertise. You’ll need to know your way around .htaccess files and other technical stuff. 

     

    But no worries! By using dedicated redirection tools, like redirect.pizza, it can all be done in a few clicks! redirect.pizza can make it really easy for you. With our easy-to-use interface, you’ll add redirects in no time. You can also import your entire redirect plan and implement redirects at scale. The tool of redirect.pizza enables path forwarding, so all of your existing paths will be kept and used in the destination domain. 

     

    With the help of redirect.pizza, you’ll be able to redirect all traffic, including HTTPS, to the new destination, without interruption.

  5. 5

    Step 5: Update online SEO tools and Search Console

    When your site migration is finished and all your redirects are set up, there is one more important thing to do. You’ll need to let Google know that you’ve moved your site. You’ll want to do this as soon as you're finished with steps 1 and 2, to minimize the long-term damage to your site’s SEO.

     

    Start with submitting a Change of Address in Google Search Console to verify your new domain name. This makes Google aware of your change. The monitoring of your site’s indexing and rankings are then continued in the same way that you’re used to. In case you have a Google Analytics account, or any other SEO tools, make sure you’ll update these too.

     

    As a final step, check all the places where your old domain appears online (your off-page SEO presence), such as your business profile in Google Maps. Change all the URL mentions to the new domain.

This is why redirect.pizza is a useful domain migration tool

Setting up redirects is a crucial and essential task when migrating domains. After all, it’s really important that all your traffic is redirected to the appropriate destination. Otherwise, your visitors will get lost and frustrated, and you’ll suffer major traffic loss. But setting up redirects without any help can be a real hassle. 

Fortunately, you’re not on your own. We can make your life a lot easier. With the help of redirect.pizza, you can be sure that all your redirects are maintained and always working correctly! redirect.pizza ensures that all traffic lands on an appropriate destination.

With our tool, multiple destination variables can be used in a single destination URL. And with our feature for regex matching, you can create infinitely complex redirect rules, and import complete paths from your old domain to your new one. 

redirect.pizza comes with an automated HTTPS service. To ensure your website is always secure, we automatically install an SSL certificate on your domain. And we’ll make sure it is always up to date. You’ll never have to worry about the security of your website again!

Another thing that will be taken care of by redirect.pizza, is the management of your DNS. Especially if you have many domains, this can be a time-consuming task. But with the help of redirect.pizza, you can update your DNS records in bulk - from multiple domains and domain providers. 

With our high-performance edge network, we provide the fastest redirects possible. The edge network minimizes the latency between user requests and redirections, ensuring faster and more responsive redirects. 

So be quick to check out our plans (there’s even a free option!), and sign up today!

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