Moving hosts, domains or changing your website name and url requires great care and planning. There are lots of tricks needed to ensure you don’t lose your site traffic or search ranking. This task is certainly NOT a design issue, it’s a coding one. If you have a site under one domain name and for business reasons need to change to another, requires care. It’s much more than just registering a new domain name, copying over (or building a new design) under that domain name, then setting a global domain redirect.
There are distinct technical processes you MUST go through to ensure your old site traffic, reputation and google ranking is retained, especially if your current domain name is several years old and you are currently getting regular traffic. Yes, moving to a new domain is a good time to review your website layout, to mobile-optimise, enhance speed and SEO, but the website ‘design’ or look is never the key problem here. Asking a web designer or marketing company to do this migration chore is high risk and inevitably disappoints.
How long before the new domain and keywords rank?
This is the most common question. Over time, google provides you a search ranking and rewards you with traffic based upon your site structure, your content, keywords, site relevancy, competition, your trustworthiness and domain longevity. Deciding to change your domain name can destroy all this within a few days and any ranking/traffic you once had, disappears. And coming to us a couple months later to fix it won’t help. The opportunity to do it right has now gone, the damage done. Google seems to allow just a few weeks to do it correctly. Beyond that, it would be like starting a business from scratch, with zero traffic. And building up ranking and traffic from scratch can take many months, quite often years!
But, if you have a long-standing, working website, there is a special technical and QA process we can go through where your ranking and traffic can be retained, quite often enhanced. To answer the question, your ranking for the new domain should stabilize within weeks, dependent upon the size of the site. So, if you’re looking to move your website to a new domain name, fill in your details below and we will get back to you
