How to change domain names without affecting your website’s performance

Switching to a new domain name is a big change. Because not only your entire website domain will change, all of your URLs, and therefore all your organic history will change with it. So how do you make sure this is done smoothly, and with a minimum impact on your website’s performance?

Here, we’ll dive deeper into why you would want to change domain names, how this will impact your website, and how to avoid losing traffic with the help of redirect.pizza.

Why would you want to change domain names?

Maybe you just don’t like it anymore, or you’ve come across a better one that’s available. But there are many other good reasons to change domain names.

1. Rebranding

Maybe you’ve decided to give your brand a complete makeover. Starting over with a fresh design and a fresh name. This will of course mean you’ll need a new domain name too. One that fits the new brand name, and reflects your image.

2. Mergers and acquisitions

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.

3. When changing the top-level-domain (TLD)

Changing the top-level-domain (TLD) can be something you’d want to do when you’d like to give your website more focus, or stand out from the rest. For instance, a TLD such as .io is usually associated with a tech company, and a TLD like .pizza will grab attention because it’s definitely different from the standard .com.

4. Copyright issues

Even with all the best intentions, it’s possible that at some point you’ll find out that your domain name is infringing on someone’s intellectual property. It could be protected by copyright. If this happens, it’s often best to change your domain name to prevent legal issues.

How does changing a domain name impact your website?

Changing a domain name changes the URL of every page on your website. So how does this impact your website’s performance?

It affects pretty much all your traffic

The changing of your domain name 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.

It affects your SEO authority

Changing domain names also greatly affects your SEO authority, also referred to as page rank. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to simply ‘transfer’ your rankings from one domain to another. Since you’ll be changing the URL of every one of your pages, Google will have to recrawl, re-evaluate and reindex each page. And this will take a while. However, if the domain change is done right, with the proper redirects, your numbers will be back to the pre-domain change level within a few weeks or so.

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 name.

How to change domain names without losing traffic using redirect.pizza

So let’s say you have a new shiny domain ready for your website. Of course, you’ll want to change domains without losing traffic. But how do you achieve this? There are a few important steps to take, and redirect.pizza can help.

Step 1: 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.

While migrating your website, the ultimate goal is to preserve your domain's SEO authority, or page rank, all without disrupting accessibility and user experience. That brings us to step two…

Step 2: Create a redirect list & set up redirects

When changing domains, you’ll need to reroute all the traffic from your old domain to your new domain. This is done with redirects. But how do you properly redirect a website to another domain? In order to set up the proper redirects, you’ll want to start by making an inventory of all your URLs. This means the URLs from your old domain, as well as the ones from your new one. 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.

There are many types of redirects, but make sure you use 301 redirects. These are permanent redirects that send visitors to your new URL when they typed in the old one in the search bar. With 301 redirects, all of your SEO value will be transferred. Learn more about the different redirect types. 

Setting up redirects might seem like a hassle, but redirect.pizza can make it really easy for you. With its easy-to-use interface, you’ll add redirects in no time. The tool of redirect.pizza also enables path forwarding, so all of your existing paths will be kept and used in the destination domain. With the feature for regex matching, you can create infinite complex redirect rules, and redirect complete paths from your old domain to new URLs.

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

Step 3: Update online SEO Tools & 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, in order 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.