Moving your website to another domain without losing searchability

Are you moving your website to a different domain name, for example from example.net to example.com? For Google, every address of your site changes then. If you do nothing, you'll lose the spot your old pages held in the search results, the links from other sites, and the bookmarks of customers. In this article you'll read how to move without losing your findability.

This article is about search engines. How to move the website itself, your email, and the DNS, you can read in Moving a domain, website, and email together without downtime: the step-by-step plan.

Step 1: create an address list

Put every old address next to the new address in a spreadsheet. According to Google, that's the most important part of a move. You can find old addresses in your current sitemap, in Search Console (Performance report, Pages tab), in your statistics, and in your CMS. Don't forget images and PDFs if those are found.

old address                               new address
https://www.example.net/                  https://www.example.com/
https://www.example.net/rouwwerk.html     https://www.example.com/rouwbloemen/
https://www.example.net/agenda-2019.html  (no successor)

If the paths stay the same, the list is simple: every old address goes to the same path on the new domain. If you also change the structure of your site at the same time, every page needs its own line.

Step 2: permanently redirect every page

• Use a 301 (permanent). Then Google will adopt the new address as the correct address. A 302 is temporary: then the old address can remain in the results.
• Redirect per page to its successor, keeping the path: example.net/contact goes to example.com/contact.
• Don't redirect everything to the homepage. According to Google, that confuses visitors and Google can see it as a page that doesn't exist (a "soft 404"). If a page has no successor, redirect it to a page that's really about the same topic, or let it disappear.
• Redirect in one step to the final address. A chain from http to https to the new domain should be made into one redirect.

If you have a hosting package, you create a redirect in DirectAdmin with Site Redirection. Choose 301 there. You can read how that works in Creating a redirect to another domain (hosting package) and, with screenshots, in Site Redirection: redirecting a domain or page. If your old domain isn't in a hosting package, you set up the redirect in My WebOké; see Creating a domain redirect/redirect (domain registration). If you use WordPress, a plugin often handles per-page redirects.

Step 3: report the move in Search Console

If you're moving to a different domain name, use the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console. That tells Google the new domain should get priority. Conditions:

1. You have both the old and the new domain in Search Console, with the same Google account. See Verifying Google Search Console with a TXT record: how to avoid mistakes.
2. The homepage, and preferably the most important pages too, of the old domain redirect with a 301 to the new domain.
3. You submit the tool for all variants of the old domain you have in Search Console, with and without www.

For a switch from http to https, or from without to with www on the same domain, you don't need the tool. Bing Webmaster Tools has a similar feature.

Step 4: update the rest

• Submit the sitemap of the new domain to Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Update links in your menu, texts, and buttons to the new addresses.
• Update your Google Business Profile, Apple Business (formerly Apple Business Connect), Bing Places, social media, and listings in directories. See Your business on Google Maps: creating and verifying a Google Business Profile.
• Ask sites that often link to you to update their link.

Step 5: keep the old domain and look for broken links

Leave the redirects in place for as long as possible. Google generally mentions at least a year; for the Change of Address tool at least 180 days, and longer as long as there's still traffic coming through the old addresses. Keep your old domain registered. If it expires, someone else can buy it and take over your old links and visitors.

In the following weeks, check in Search Console whether pages with error 404 (not found) show up, and go through your address list: every old address should end up at the right new page with one 301. The access log in DirectAdmin also shows which addresses give a 404; see Site overview and logs: the error log and the access log.

Don't be alarmed if your rankings fluctuate in the first weeks. Google warns that this is temporarily normal; for a medium-sized site it can take weeks before everything has been processed.

Further reading

• Google: Site Moves With URL Changes
• Google: Redirects and Google Search
• Search Console Help: Change of Address Tool
• WordPress Course: Moving a WordPress Site