Changing your domain can impact your website's authority, rankings, and traffic volumes. If the site migration is not done following best practices for changing domains, it could lead to a loss of all your traffic and search engine rankings.

Compile a list of your current website's pages.After migration, you will need to set up redirects from all old pages to their new locations on the new domain.

You can obtain a list of your site's pages using services like aHrefs, Semrush, etc., or programs like Screaming Frog, Site Analyzer, etc.

After obtaining your site's page list, you need to map each of your URLs on the current domain to the URLs on the new domain.

Primarily, the redirect map is essential for conducting further testing after migrating the site to a new domain. This step can be skipped, but we advise against doing so.

Ensure that all URLs on your site's new domain correspond exactly to those on the old domain.

As soon as you launch your website on the new domain, you will need to implement 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirection that signals to search engines and browsers that your original URLs have been permanently replaced with new ones.

This has two important effects:

Without implementing 301 redirects, any user or search engine visiting your old domain will encounter a 404 page or a "Not Found" error if the site is disabled. Or they will see your old website if the content is still available.

The following code for the .htaccess file performs a page-by-page redirect from one domain to another:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} old-domain.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Where:

old-domain.com — the domain from which the redirect occurs;

new-domain.com — the domain to which the redirect occurs.

It’s important to understand that this code will only work if the page addresses on your new domain remain the same as on the old one. If you plan to change page addresses, it’s advisable to seek specialist help for setting up the correct redirect, as the configurations may vary depending on your CMS and hosting.

Here is important to do two things:

First, go to your existing account in Google Search Console.

Click on the dropdown list of properties in the top left corner and select "Add a property".

And then add your domain in the appropriate field.

To use it, both of your domains in Google search console (old and new domains) must be confirmed as "Domain" and not "URL Prefix".

In the settings block, there’s an option to change the address.

In the GSC of your old domain, select the change address option, then enter the address of your new domain.

Then click "Check and update".

Subsequently, Google will seek to confirm that the necessary redirects have been set up before recognizing the address change. This step is essential. The use of the Change of Address tool in GSC cannot replace the actual setup of redirects.

To complete the domain address change, click "Confirm move".

After a successful completion, a relocation notification in GSC will appear on both the old and new domains.

The Search Console will start to populate data for your new domain (this may take several days) and notify you of any related errors.

After verifying the new domain, you need to update all internal links on your site. You should replace links leading to your old domain with links leading to your new domain.

Old links will of course work due to the redirect, but through a redirect chain.

A redirect chain occurs when there are multiple consecutive redirects between the initial requested URL and the final destination URL. Each redirect can slow down the loading of your site for the user.

You can find redirect chains and links to the old domain using the same services you used for creating the redirect map.

If your site had traffic and external links - it's advisable to maintain the old domain indefinitely. Yes, you will have several domains for annual renewal.

Theoretically, you could disable the old domain after completing the move in GSC and recovering search positions, but this would result in the loss of link equity leading to the old domain, likely causing the new domain to drop in rankings.