How to change the domain without losing visitors?

The process of transferring a site to a new domain name has never been easy and fast. Even the most famous companies should weigh the pros and cons before making such a decision. Almost all site owners who changed their domain name, noted a sharp drop in the SEO rating, and, consequently, attendance.

Experts noted that this year the transition to another domain has become even more painful. The reason for this is a change in Google search algorithms. The search system has less trust in any new sites containing a large amount of non-original content and external links. Since both are inevitable, if you simply copy the old site to a new domain, your SEO rating will plummet.

In this article, we will discuss how to avoid such a scenario. If you change the domain, in any case you will lose a part of the audience for some time, but these methods, in any case, will help to avoid a sharp collapse of the rating.
')

Change of design, site structure, content, IP-address, etc.

Everything is simple here. If you change too much, Google will not trust your new site. Domain change is a risky procedure, so you don’t have to change everything at once. During the first few months, the structure of the new site should be identical to the structure of the old one. The maximum that can be changed is the logo if you are rebranding.

Redirects

The main rule of successful transition - use redirects. Absolutely every page of your old site should redirect visitors to an exact copy of this page on a new domain. Therefore, we do not advise you to change the structure of the site: otherwise it will become much more difficult to create correctly working redirects.

Of course, for this it is necessary for some time to maintain the old site in working condition. Simply disabling the old domain and immediately starting the site on the new one is a very unfortunate decision.

Be sure to explain to the developers that the process of creating redirects should be approached with all the responsibility. Often they underestimate the importance of this moment, and as a result, broken links and various errors appear on the site. Within a few days, Google will not pay attention to some errors, but in the future SEO-rating will start to fall.

Please note that in order for Google to start indexing a new domain, considering the information on it as being moved and not duplicated, you need to use the redirect 301, and not 302.

Practice

Here are a few examples: the graphs below show the SEO ratings for the old and new sites of companies that have decided to change their domain.



The owner of the company followed the recommendations of the experts. In particular, he did not make a sharp transition: even after the launch of the new domain, he fully supported the site on the old domain for more than a year. The period of falling rating was short, the company managed to avoid a strong drop in attendance.



Here the creator of the site announced in advance about the transition of the company to a new domain. The new site has not yet been created, but at the same time the old site, apparently, has ceased to be fully supported and filled with original content (you can see a drop in the SEO rating). The result is negative, although there is a tendency towards a gradual increase in the rating of the new domain.



An example of a sharp transition. The old site was disconnected almost immediately after the launch of the new domain. The most unfortunate decision. Exit the "pique" will be very difficult.

To conclude the article, let us say that with all this, no one has canceled the most general and already well-known rules: to create original content and use less of other materials and refer to them.

We hope our recommendations will help you to transfer your website to a new domain without losing your visitors.