When you buy or rent a new home, there’s a lot of planning and preparation to be done before loading the truck on moving day. The same can be said for moving a website from an old domain name to a new domain. If you don’t handle site migration properly, users and search engines might get confused, web traffic can decline, and search engine optimization will suffer.
Learn about domain migration, how the migration process works, how to plan the move, and how to monitor results.
What is domain migration?
Domain migration is the process of moving a website from one domain to a different domain. A business might make this move when it rebrands itself or if it needs a domain name that better suits the company’s name or business offerings.
Businesses also sometimes do domain migrations when they want to boost search engine optimization (SEO), improve user experience, optimize performance, or add enhanced website security.
Reasons for domain migrations
There are many reasons to do a domain migration. Here are some of the common ones:
- Rebranding. When a business goes through a rebrand, a new domain name may help align with the new branding, especially when the company name changes.
- Mergers and acquisitions. Business mergers or acquisitions can lead to the consolidation of multiple domains into one domain. The new domain name can coincide with major changes on the new website.
- Technical issues. Businesses may outgrow their old web hosting provider and need better performance with more reliability, bandwidth, and better customer support. So they migrate their old website to the new host.
- Naming conflicts. Sometimes intellectual property disputes will lead to domain migration. If the domain name is a copyright infringement, moving to a new domain name can help avoid legal hassles.
How to successfully execute a domain migration
Changing domains successfully from a previous domain to a new environment depends on careful planning. The steps below can serve as a guide:
1. Develop a migration strategy
Domain migration is a serious undertaking so it helps to plan ahead by doing the following:
- Pick the right time for the move. It’s not ideal to migrate during peak traffic hours. Pick a time when traffic is slower, such as at night or during a weekend.
- Make a checklist. Think of everything you must do to have a smooth migration and make a list that you can check off one by one. Here’s a helpful checklist for migrating your website to Shopify.
- Record current site content. A detailed migration plan should catalog the contents of the old structure, along with the site’s performance data. Now’s the time to decide which pages to preserve, update, or ditch.
- Check links. Comb through all the external links that point to external websites and resources outside your domain. Cull broken links and update the important external links. Back up the old site data in case something goes wrong.
- Develop a timeline. Include a schedule of tasks and milestones and loop in essential personnel on the technical and business side. Notify users, vendors, and search engines of the move.
- Analyze the strongest performing pages for SEO. Use SEO tools like Google Analytics to analyze your website’s performance data. Key factors to understand include organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, page load time, and crawl errors. Use this data as a baseline for comparison to the new domain’s metrics after migration.
2. Migrate content
Migrating content happens in stages. Different tools and techniques are available to ease you through the process. Check your web hosting provider to see if it has tools installed that can help. A file transfer protocol (FTP) client software can handle simple static site migrations, moving HTML files from the old to the new web server. Here are other details to consider:
- New sitemap. Create an XML sitemap for the new domain that reproduces the structure and contents of the website. Reduce SEO damage with a new URL structure that largely matches your old URLs. Update HTML page meta tags (titles, descriptions, keywords) to mirror changes to the business name. Submit the sitemap to the Google search console after migration.
- Redirects. Update internal links to point to the new site. Map all the URLs to the new target domain using 301 redirects. These preserve link equity and mitigate traffic loss. Update the robots.txt file in the root directory of the website to lead search bots to the new sitemap.
- Link equity. Preserve link equity by evaluating the most valuable backlinks from other websites and ask them to update their links to point from the old URL to the new domain.
- Hosting and CMS settings. Update hosting environment settings and verify compatibility with your content management system (CMS) to prevent any conflicts during the migration. Verify that the new hosting environment meets the requirements of your CMS in terms of server specifications, database compatibility, and software versions.
- Email setup. Configure your email system for the new domain to avoid communication disruptions.
- Content. Transfer database and web content to the new host. Migrate the CMS-related files and settings. Update all links and remove outdated content.
- DNS records. Domain name system (DNS) records send domain names to numeric IP addresses. To reflect the change in domain hosting, go to the domain registrar control panel and update DNS settings—either the A or CNAME records—to point to the new server’s IP address. Verify the changes using a DNS lookup address tool.
3. Test post-migration
Verify that the website is working correctly. Monitor all the traffic, and track the site’s SEO after a search engine crawls the new domain. Focus on the following and make adjustments as needed:
- CMS. Is the content management system performing correctly? Start with the landing page and link through all the pages. Check to see that the content survived the move intact, including text, formatting, images, video, and external links.
- User experience. Perform user experience testing on the website. Test the old site for proper redirects. Are there broken links on the new site?
- Indexing. Verify if search engines are indexing the new domain. Go to your Google Analytics account to confirm index status, and whether the platform is tracking traffic data and the website’s performance.
4. Monitor SEO
The ultimate test of successful migration is a weeks- or months-long process, meaning you won’t see the results of the website’s SEO for some time. After you have updated the Google search console, use its tools to look for crawl errors, perform a link audit of external links pointing to the site, and track traffic and performance.
Risks of domain migrations
You may run into serious downsides when you migrate domains. These can include:
Loss of traffic
When you move to a new location, your website will temporarily lose traffic because it takes a few weeks or even months for search engines to catch up and update their indexes so visitors can find the new domain. This is why proper setup of 301 redirects are so important. They point traffic from old URLs to the new domain, so customers will be redirected to your new site.
Eventually, when Google crawls the site again, it will realize that the domain has moved and rank the new one. Things get more complicated and risky when you couple migration with a major site overhaul. If the new site structure is drastically different, organic traffic may never fully recover.
SEO damage
It would be nice if you could move your existing search rank and link authority from the old domain to the new domain, but that’s not how it works. Once you migrate the domain, Google will need time to crawl and evaluate the site.
In the meantime, you can expect reduced SEO authority—at least temporarily. It’s critical that redirects work correctly from day one to minimize the damage. Search rank eventually will recover, but it may take a month or two.
Website malfunctions
Plenty of things can go wrong on the technical side of a migration: inaccurate DNS and server configurations, problems with SSL certificates, broken links, data loss, performance glitches, and other hiccups. Another problem that can crop up is redirect chains, when redirects aren’t pointing the right way, ending up in infinite loops or long chains of redirects that frustrate users.
You can recover from such damages if you’ve backed up the data before migration. If data is lost or corrupted during migration, backups let you restore it to its previous state while you identify the changes that may have caused problems.
Domain migration FAQ
What should you do after migrating to a new domain?
After your domain migration, update the DNS records, redirect the old domain, and update website links and social media profiles. Monitor website performance and update analytics tracking to monitor the transition’s impact.
What is an example of a domain migration?
An example of a domain migration is when a company rebrands itself, updates its website, and changes domain names. In this instance, it would need to migrate the website and all associated data to the new domain.
How do you migrate from one domain to another?
To migrate a domain, you must update DNS records to point to the new server and redirect the old domain to the new one. Then check that all website links and social media profiles link back to the new domain.
