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How not to Lose Traffic and Sales During the Domain Change
January 21, 2025
10 mins
How are you going to change your domain name without risking all the good work you’ve done online in the past? In this guide, you’ll find all there is to know about how not to lose traffic and sales during the domain change.
Read on and make the most of this transition with the following domain migration best practices.
Let’s explore them one by one.
More often than not, revamping your website involves changing your old domain.
Regardless of the reason you are doing it - hopefully to match your brand’s growth and make it more attractive to your current and potential audience, understanding the impact such a process can have on SEO and traffic is crucial.
Knowing how you can tackle this impact effectively will ensure you emerge from the domain name change procedure with minimal losses. When switching from an old to a new domain, SEO and traffic may undergo some significant swaps, which, if left unattended, may affect your customers’ experience, your sales, and your profit down the line.
Here are the key impacts:
Changing a domain name without any of the aforementioned consequences is unrealistic. However, you can predict the issues and plan domain migration accordingly. For example, when conducting the domain name change for our client MacNest, our team accurately predicted a 50% drop in traffic and came up with a plan that helped restore 155% of it in 4 months. After the recovery, the new website was producing 55% better results trafficwise than the initial one. We also set the date for migration to make sure our SEO experts would address all the errors and other unexpected problems immediately.
See the full case study:
Here are some top SEO strategies for domain migration from our experience.
A successful domain name change needs a proactive strategy. Before jumping into the new website, make sure you have done some research concerning your metrics and keep tabs on them.
Keep an eye on:
This means building your new domain out of public view where you can make all the changes and adjustments undisturbed while keeping the current page online.
You also need to do the work during periods when the traffic is lower - perhaps when sales are on, it’s not the best time for such a task.
You don’t want your customers to try to find your incomplete website, nor try to buy your products and come across unfamiliar territory.
Pro Tip: If it’s possible, maintain your existing URL structure to make things easier for both users and search engines.
After making a list of all your website’s pages, use 301 redirects to make sure that all the old URLs correspond to the new URLs.
This way, the search engines will know that a new domain is alive and kicking while broken links and 404 errors will be eliminated - not to say vanished for good. Design your 404 error pages to be user-friendly and include the site’s menu in them.
After doing your 301 redirecting, it’s time to ensure that all internal links point to the new domain.
You’ll have to meticulously go through each page to do the switching and include all links, whether they appear on your XML sitemap, your site’s code, or your robots.txt file.
Now, the most stressful exciting part.
Be careful: before starting migrating the two domains, it is recommended to back up your old domain. This tactic will allow you to compare the new with the old version to check page by page if everything is updated as needed and permit you to return to the old site whenever you need to.
For MacNest, we meticulously backed up their old site, which allowed them to compare metrics and ensure nothing was lost during the migration. The full tailored plan looked like this:
After making sure everything is set, you can let your new domain run line by removing its password or beta version.
Site Audit from Semrush can come in handy here as it will run the new domain and report if something is “off”.
Contact sites linking to your old domain and request updates to the new domain’s URL. Use redirects to capture link equity from unchangeable external backlinks.
No one likes slow websites. People will probably skip a slow-loading domain after seconds should it lack speed.
This is why optimizing your site’s speed is crucial. Other than that it’s also important to make it mobile-friendly and suitable for all categories of users to access it.
Once everything else is set, it’s time to announce the changes to your audience.
Change your domain URL in social media profiles, business directories, and anywhere else your website is linked. Add an on-site announcement on the old domain with a link to the new one.
Read more blogs to SEO like a pro:
Starting SEO Right after Website Development? You are Already Late!
Tailoring SEO Strategy With Promodo Marketers
How to Create an Effective Title Tag: Tips, Examples, and Common Mistakes
Which Links Can Harm Your Website: A Guide to Using the Disavow Tool
To be fully aligned with the steps you need to take for a successful domain migration and make sure you don’t leave anything out, we have prepared a useful checklist that includes a domain change SEO checklist too!
So, copy it and tick each box once you complete it!
I. The Planning Phase
☐ Set the Time and the Timeline
☐ Audit Your Current Domain
☐ Backup the Old Website
II. The Technical Preparation Phase
☐ Register the New Domain
☐ Set Up the New Website
☐ Check Site Speed, Mobile-Friendliness, and All-User Friendliness
III. The Redirecting Phase
☐ Implement 301 Redirects
☐ Update Your Internal Links
IV. The SEO Phase
☐ Update Your Sitemap and Robots.txt
☐ Submit a Change of Address (Use Google Search Console)
☐ Fix any 404 errors
V. The Social Media and Backlinks Changing Phase
☐ Update Major Backlinks
☐ Update Social Profiles and other Listings
VII. The Monitoring Phase
☐ Ensure and Update Analytics and Tracking Codes
☐ Monitor Traffic and Rankings
VIII. The Communication Phase
☐ Make the Migration Known
IX. The Post-Migration Monitoring Phase
☐ Audit Redirects
☐ Fix Broken Links
☐ Monitor SEO Performance
☐ Submit Updated Backlinks
Preserving backlinks is a critical element for the success of the new domain. But, how can you do it the right way? Here is the deal for successful backlink management during domain migration:
First, you have to know which they are and gather them in one place. You can do that by using a specific tool like Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool, that allows you to see all the links pointing to the older version of your site.
Detect which of them are related to high-authority websites because these links are the most valuable. Once you identify them comes the difficult part: contacting them and asking to update their existing links following the new URL.
Craft a nice diplomatic letter/message and send it to the person in charge (either the website owner or the marketing strategist) providing them with your website’s new address and your request.
Keep track of their progress and resort to kind reminders if you need to. Remember that you are responsible for your domain’s rankings.
As already mentioned, it’s super important to redirect effectively the pages and content from the old to the new website.
Here are some effective redirect strategies:
This is crucial. You want to ensure that your new URL is linked to its new location. Every single time. For every URL that is moving. Don’t rush to finish. Your work will reward you later on.
2. Try To Eliminate Redirect Chains
The more chains are created the less effective your domain migration will be. Your goal is to minimize them and “tell” Google that you go from URL A to URL B with nothing in between.
3. Redirect “SEO valuable” URLs First
In case you have detected some URLs with higher rankings than others, redirect them first. This will give you a big advantage, especially if you are stressed by deadlines.
This means that if you air your new domain before you get the chance to finish the redirecting process, you’ll have at least the most valuable links set online.
4. Use 301 Redirects - and Avoid 302 Ones
As already stated, implementing 301 redirects will put you a step ahead of your competition.
Once the migration is over, don’t assume that your job is also over. There is quite some work left, and it refers to the traffic analysis post-domain change.
Google recommends to keep monitoring your new domain for at least 6 months without erasing the old one. This is when you’ll return to your old site’s metrics and compare them to the ones you get for the new domain.
Check out the bounce rates, and in case they are higher than before, it’s a sign the new site needs some adjustments.
Feel free to use our SEO Health Checker post-migration to identify blind spots⬇.
In the case of MacNest, our team monitored their rankings and traffic consistently post-migration and adjusted the strategy based on the data collected. This ongoing optimization helped them outperform their pre-migration traffic within a short time frame.
Changes in your domain name need to go public. You want to inform your audience after you’ve completed the transition to be easily found.
Here is how communicating domain change to customers can be done effectively:
Proper communication will ensure you won’t lose traffic and sales during the domain change.
[[FAQ-START]]
The most common reason is that your brand has outgrown its domain name.
Other than that, the domain name of your initial choice may be now free and you want to obtain it, or your current one hasn’t been proven so catchy.
That depends on various factors. From the availability and safety of the new domain to how quickly you achieve each small milestone of the whole migration process.
The best way is to plan the project and use a checklist for each phase to guide you. And if you don’t consider yourself a tech freak, hire a professional to do it for you.
Domain change can affect both organic traffic and SEO. This is why using domain migration best practices can help you retain both of them while minimizing sales loss.
Opt for implementing 301 redirecting best strategies, preserving backlinks, and comparing the metrics of both your old and new website to use them as guidance for adjustments. Invest in monitoring tools for extra help, and don’t miss communicating domain change to customers before and after it takes place.
[[FAQ-END]]
If you are ready to take that leap of faith and transition to a new domain name, wondering how not to lose traffic and sales during the domain change, should now cease to worry you.
With all the above effective redirect strategies you’ve discovered in this article, you can confidently proceed to your brand’s online makeover knowing how to mitigate possible risks.
Of course this business is incredibly nuanced, and requires a professional approach.
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