Changing your domain name without losing what you've built

A business we know changed its name last year and moved to the matching domain. The search side went perfectly. Redirects were clean, rankings held, the whole thing was over in about three weeks and nobody had to think about it again.

They still lost about a month of enquiries.

The contact form on the new site was sending to a mailbox on the old domain that nobody had migrated. The emails were being delivered, technically, into an inbox no living person opened. They found out when a customer rang up annoyed that nobody had got back to them, and then went and counted.

That's the shape of most domain changes, in my experience. The bit everyone worries about is fine. The bit nobody has on a list is where the damage happens.

Reasons that hold up, and one that doesn't

Worth being honest about whether you need to do this at all, because it's genuinely disruptive and it's often driven by taste.

The good reasons are structural. The business name has actually changed. Two businesses merged and you're now running two websites that compete with each other for the same searches. Or the current domain is a spelling problem, the kind where you lose people every time you say it on the phone, and you've been quietly paying for that for years.

The one I'd push back on is moving from a .com.au to a .com because the .com feels more serious. For an Australian business selling to Australians, it isn't. A .com.au tells a customer where you are before they've read anything, and the eligibility rules behind it mean it isn't handed out to anybody, which is exactly why it carries the signal it does. If you're weighing that up, read auDA's own explanation of the .au namespaces first, because the eligibility side also decides what you're allowed to hold and it's a poor thing to discover late.

Buying the .com and pointing it at your existing site is a different decision and a fine one. That's insurance, not a migration.

The search side is the easy part

It's easy because it's well documented and because the mechanism is the same one you'd use in any rebuild.

Every old address gets a permanent redirect to its closest equivalent on the new domain, page by page. Not everything piled onto the new home page, which is the version that goes wrong. If your pages aren't changing, only the domain, this is close to mechanical, and it's the one scenario where the mapping work is genuinely quick. We went through how to build that map, and how to get the list of old URLs, in the piece on rebuilding without losing your rankings.

Two things specific to a domain change. Verify both the old and new properties in Search Console and use the Change of Address tool, which tells Google what you've done rather than making it infer it from redirect patterns. And keep renewing the old domain. Not for a year. Indefinitely. It costs almost nothing and letting it lapse hands away every link anyone has ever given you, plus, eventually, your old email addresses to whoever picks it up next.

Expect a couple of weeks of noise while Google recrawls. If something is still wrong a month later it's usually a redirect that was never written, and the way to find it is to type your top twenty old addresses into a browser one at a time. Tedious, fifteen minutes, finds the fault more often than anything clever.

Email is where it actually goes wrong

Here's the part I'd put at the top of the list.

Your MX records point mail for a domain at a mailbox. Change domains and you now have two, and the failure mode isn't a bounce, which you'd notice. It's silent delivery to somewhere nobody looks. Keep the old domain receiving, forward it to the new mailboxes, and leave that forwarding in place for years, because suppliers and old customers will use the old address well past the point you think they've stopped.

The other one is your website's own sending. Contact forms, booking confirmations and invoices all send from somewhere, and if the new domain doesn't have SPF and DKIM set up properly, those messages start landing in spam. The form still says "thanks, we'll be in touch". You just never see it. Send yourself a test enquiry from the live site on launch day, from an outside address, and check the junk folder before you decide it worked.

And every staff email signature, every invoice template, every automatic reply. Boring. Takes an afternoon. Skip it and you'll be finding them for a year.

Everywhere else your address is written down

Your website is a small fraction of the places your domain exists.

The one that matters most for search is your Google Business Profile, where the website URL needs to change to the new domain rather than relying on the redirect. Then the industry directories, your accounting software, any invoice or quote template, social profiles, review links you've been sending customers, and the printed things. Vehicle signage, shopfront, flyers, the ad in the local paper. You don't have to fix the printed ones immediately, which is the whole reason you keep the old domain alive.

Make a list on paper before launch. Everyone thinks they know all the places. Everyone finds four more.

How long until it feels normal

A few weeks for search to settle, a couple of months before you stop noticing, and about a year before an old email address finally stops arriving.

If traffic hasn't come back after a month, check the boring thing first, which is whether the new site is even allowed in the index. Staging flags come across during a domain move more often than anyone admits, and we covered that whole category separately.

Before any of it, do one thing: send a test enquiry through your current contact form and confirm a human receives it. If that's already broken on your existing domain, and it is more often than you'd think, the domain change was never the problem. We'll check that and the rest of the site for free if you'd rather someone else looked.