Migrating to a new domain without losing your traffic

You bought the better name. Now the existing site has to move to it without taking the search presence down with it. This is a well-understood procedure and it fails in the same few places every time.

Before you touch anything

Record where you are starting from: current traffic by page, current rankings for the terms you care about, a complete list of URLs, and which pages carry inbound links. Without a baseline you cannot tell a normal dip from a disaster.

Export the full URL list. Every single one needs a destination, and the ones you forget are the ones that were earning.

Map every URL

Old URL to new URL, one to one, wherever a genuine equivalent exists. Do not take the shortcut of pointing everything at the new home page: to a search engine that reads as the old pages ceasing to exist, and the accumulated value of each page goes with them.

Where a page genuinely has no equivalent, send it to the closest relevant section, not the root.

Use permanent redirects

Permanent, not temporary. A temporary redirect tells search engines the old address is still the canonical one, which is precisely the opposite of what a migration means.

Redirect in one hop. Chains of redirects work for people and dilute the signal, and they accumulate over years until nobody remembers why a page takes four jumps.

Keep the old domain

For years, not months. The redirects need to stay live while links, bookmarks and stale indexes catch up, and that process is slow. Letting the old name expire a year after a migration hands your inbound links to whoever registers it next.

Budget the renewal as part of the migration cost. It is the cheapest line in the project.

Update what you control

Internal links to absolute new URLs, not redirected old ones. Canonical tags. Sitemaps. Structured data. Email signatures, social profiles, advertising destinations, app store listings, printed materials still in circulation.

Then ask the sites that link to you most to update. Most will not, which is fine — the redirects handle it — but the largest few are worth an email.

Tell the search engines

Verify the new domain in the search console tools, use the change-of-address facility where offered, and submit the new sitemap. This does not replace the redirects; it speeds up recognition of what the redirects already say.

Go live and watch

Move during a quiet period, not before your busiest season. Immediately afterwards, crawl the old URL list and confirm every one redirects in a single hop to a page that returns successfully.

Expect a dip. A few weeks of reduced traffic is normal while the index updates. Recovery to previous levels within one to two months is the usual pattern; no recovery after that points at a mapping problem, and the first thing to check is the list of URLs nobody mapped.

The mistakes that cause the damage

Redirecting everything to the home page. Using temporary redirects. Letting the old domain expire. Migrating and redesigning simultaneously, so that when traffic falls nobody can tell which change caused it. Doing it a fortnight before the busiest period of the year.