Home - Change Domain Name Without Losing SEO
There will be times when you want to change your domain name and it could be due to the numbers of reasons.
When you change the domain name, you may lose all the traffic from SEO ranking you have earned with old domain name.
Fortunately, there is a way by which you can change the domain name of your website (Domain Name) without affecting your current ranking in any search engine. (You may also like reading: Google website ranking factor & Google Search Algorithm). But when it comes to WordPress things get with complicated but with the right care and some technical knowledge you can perform it in few hours.
In fact, I’m in the process of changing my personal website domain name to new domain name from www.shashi.space to www.theindianguy.in and I am writing this article, as I proceed with altering the domain name for my WordPress powered website which ranks well for SEO in India, these are the steps we follow as SEO Company in Mumbai.
Checklist before changing Domain Name for your WordPress Site
- Your new domain control panel.
- WordPress admin access.
- Netspaceindia client login detail or if you have WHM root or reseller hosting password.
- Google Webmaster tools access To your old and new domain properties are verified. ( this article about how to verify your property in Google Webmaster explain everything in details)
Change your Domain Name Server
Initially, change your new domain name server to your hosting provider.
In my case, I am using a plan from our Linux shared hosting server with nameserver ns7.netspace india.com and ns8.netspaceindia.com.
So, I logged into our panel and updated nameserver of www.theindianguy.in to ns7.netspaceindia.com and ns8.netspaceindia.com.
Here are detailed steps mentioned about how to change nameserver of your domain name but, in case, you are not our customer you can refer your provider knowledge base for the same.
Audit old Domain Name and Website
Before editing the domain name of your website, I will strongly recommend auditing your website.
- Make a list of all the caves in which you are ranking. After all, with all effort, you made from your content writing, you don’t wont to lose your ranking.
- Ensure that your old Domain names what’s crawled by search engine
In my case, www.shashi.space is the relatively very new domain name. But for this how-to article, I have taken a snapshot of one of my long tail keyword as an instance.
We will check the status of ranking after changing the domain name to new one.
Change Domain Name in WordPress
Login to your admin area of your WordPress website setting >> general setting
You will notice your old domain name mentioned under WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) as seen in the screenshot below:
Change those two fields with your new domain name, in my above case www.theindianguy.in
Update your hosting setting
a. If you have Linux Reseller Hosting Plan :
If you are have Linux Shared Reseller Hosting plan or root WHM access, login into WHM >> List Account >> Search For your old domain (shashi.space) >> Click on + icon >> Modify account (As shown in screenshot below ):
In the primary domain name modify shashi.space (old domain name) with theindianguy.in (new domain name) and click save
Now, just go to your domain name (theindianguy.in) this should open now.
b. For Windows Reseller Hosting Plan :
Login into Plesk panel for your windows reseller hosting, Go to Home > Subscriptions > subscription_name > Websites & Domains > main_domain_name
Click on Hosting Settings tab and specify a new name for the domain.
c. For Shared Hosting :
If you are using any of our shared hosting services, like Linux shared hosting or windows shared hosting or WordPress hosting then you can contact us by opening a ticket with us and we will change those setting for free. If you want to know How do I create and manage support tickets from client area then you must read here.
In case you are not our customer, then you can contact your hosting service provider and they should be able to help you with this.
Change Domain Property of old site
Congratulation, by now your website should be live with new domain name but things are not done here yet.
Login into the domain panel of old domain, and apply domain forwarding at the domain level.
Most of the domain provider charge some fees for this service but at netspaceindia.com you can avail domain forwarding for free.
Make sure following things :
- URL Masking is switched off, disabling URL masking will ensure that your visitors see the destination URL (theindianguy.in) and not the source URL (shashi.space)
Must Read: Guide to URL Masking
- Switch on Sub Domain Forwarding Enabling Sub Domain Forwarding will forward a request made to http://subdomain.shashi.space to http://theindianguy.in/subdomain/
- Enable Path Forwarding Enabling Path Forwarding will forward requests made to http://shashi.space/some/path to http://theindianguy.in/some/path
Let Google know about it!
Now it’s time to update Google and tell them that you have moved. Login into google webmaster >> select your old property (old domain name, shashi.space) and click on setting button on the right top side of the page (as shown in the screenshot below), click on change domain name.
And then follow the four easy steps mentioned in next page, which will look like this :
Additionally, you will also get notification from google for domain change request submitted to your registered email address of webmaster.
Execute!
Ok, here we are done!!!
Enjoy the move. Total time taken for this exercise was 30 minutes.
I Will update this article in few days for the updated URL change in the search engine and compare with the audit I did on step two.
After few days, the new domain name started coming on google result.
Feel free to ask any related question in the comment and I will try to answer as soon as I can.
Shashi kant Pandidhar
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