Moving a website to a new domain

Moving a website to a new domain: how to do it without losing SEO

A company name change, a brand refresh or simply wanting to move to a clearer domain — there are many reasons why companies decide to move their website to a new domain. The problem is that a move done wrongly can wipe out years of accumulated Google rankings, organic traffic and even customer trust in a single day. At CREATING.LV we recently carried out exactly this kind of project — a full domain move with hundreds of individual URLs — and in this article we share how to carry out such a migration correctly.

Why a domain change is a risky operation

Google treats every website address (URL) as a separate entity with its own history, links and level of trust. When you change your domain, you are essentially asking Google to “transfer” all this history to a new address. If this is done carelessly — without redirects or with incorrectly matched URLs — the search engine simply sees hundreds of new, unknown pages and hundreds of missing old ones. As a result, organic traffic can drop by as much as 50–90% within a few weeks.

Step 1: a complete list of existing URLs

Before anything else is done, you need to extract a structured list of all URLs on the old domain — not just the main pages but also product, category, blog and archive URLs. This can be done using:

• a Google Search Console export (the Coverage/Pages section)
• the XML sitemap
• server log file analysis (which also shows URLs that are indexed but not in the sitemap)

Step 2: URL mapping (slug mapping)

Each old URL needs to be matched with a new, corresponding URL on the new domain. This is the process where mistakes are most often made — redirecting everything to the home page (a “catch-all” redirect) instead of keeping a 1:1 relationship between the old and new addresses. If the URL structure of a product or article changes, each page needs its own individual redirect rather than a general one.

Step 3: implementing 301 redirects

A 301 redirect (permanent redirect) tells both the browser and the search engine that the page has moved to a new address permanently, and most of the “link juice”, or SEO value, is passed to the new URL. In WordPress, this can be done in several ways:

• At server level (.htaccess for Apache servers or in the Nginx configuration), which is the fastest solution and does not put load on WordPress
• With a plugin (for example, Redirection), if an easier-to-manage interface is needed
• With a custom function in the functions.php file, if the redirect logic is linked to language versions (for example, Polylang) or other dynamic conditions

After implementing the redirects, each URL has to be checked with the curl -I command to make sure the server returns exactly a 301 status code (not a 302 temporary redirect) and the correct destination address.

Step 4: updating Google Search Console and other tools

After activating the redirects:

1. The new domain has to be verified in Google Search Console
2. The “Change of Address” tool has to be used, if it is available in your Search Console version
3. The new domain’s sitemap has to be submitted
4. Tracking codes for Analytics, Google Ads and other tools have to be moved to the new domain
5. Internal links, email signatures and external profiles (Google Business Profile, social networks) have to be updated to the new address

How long it takes for Google to “move over” to the new domain

In practice, a full move happens gradually — some pages are reindexed within a few days, but a full recovery of traffic can take 4–8 weeks depending on the size of the site and how often it is crawled. During this period, it is important not to make additional changes to the structure or content, so as not to create further uncertainty for Google’s algorithms.

The most common mistakes to avoid

• A catch-all redirect to the home page instead of individual URL mapping
• A forgotten robots.txt that blocks the new domain from being crawled
• Outdated canonical tags that still point to the old domain
• Redirect chains (URL A → URL B → URL C), which slow down page loading and reduce SEO effectiveness
• Switching off the old domain too early, before the redirects have been confirmed to work

Summary

Moving a website to a new domain is a technically complex but fully manageable process if it is planned in a structured way — with a complete URL list, precise mapping, server-level 301 redirects and careful Google Search Console configuration. The CREATING.LV team has direct experience of projects of this kind, including cases with hundreds of individual URLs and multilingual WordPress installations. If you are planning a domain or brand change, get in touch with us — we will help you avoid losing traffic and rankings.