Are you thinking about changing the domain of your website? If yes, then what about your SEO efforts, till date. 301 permanent redirects are relatively simple to do, especially if you are familiar with them. As long as your current domain has existed for some time, it may have collected some authority, which has been indexed by search engines.

It would be impossible for original domains to retain their SEO juice if they were changed entirely. While this is true, it is possible to switch domains and maintain your domain authority.

Why would a business change their domain name? Here are some reasons:

• When company do rebranding and renaming of business
• If company previously owned a domain with a less-popular top-level domain (e.g., .io or .net), now want to move to a .com domain
• When you are merging numerous properties together
• And, when company’s old domain has sitewide penalty, or want to start from scratch.

Make sure the URL structure and protocols of the new domain closely resemble the domain’s old site before changing it. This includes the http/https protocol. Also, you should expect a temporary decrease in traffic once you make the change as Google re-crawls your site.

Here are some tips on how to change your website’s URL without losing any SEO juice. This helps keep your site high on search engine results pages and makes it more likely for your business to be found by customers everywhere.

Duplicate the site on latest domain.

Your website can be moved to the new domain in these three ways: first, you can create an entirely new site. Secondly, you can copy your existing site to the new domain. And third option is that you can simply update your current domain.

Within WordPress, you can do these changes through general settings. Once you’re in general settings, you’ll need to change the WordPress address and the site address, including the protocol. But remember, once you click on Save Changes, then you’ll able to only access the dashboard from the new domain.

Add 301 redirects to old pages

Every SEO company requests to redirect the old site to the new site with a 301 permanent redirect. It is important to redirect domains in order to increase your search engine rankings because, even if you completely deactivate your old site, links to it remain online. These backlinks act as indicators of your authority and visibility in search engine results. You lose all the “link juice” that comes from those other sites if you don’t redirect visitors who click on their links. By redirecting those visitors, you transfer this authority to your site.

Depending on your site’s history, your redirects may need to be active for eternity. Although, it’s possible to manually update your backlinks, doing so is next to impossible. Because of that, it’s worth the extra expense to keep your old domain and its associated redirects.

Update hard-coded or internal links

After you’ve configured your website on your new domain, you’ll need to determine if all the links have been updated. If you’re using WordPress, there are a variety of methods to do this.  It is also possible to run a search and replace, looking for your old domain and replacing it with your new domain. This is immensely helpful if you are simply copying your website to a new domain, and you can check to see that you didn’t miss any links by running your new site through a 404 error detection service, like BrokenLinkCheck.com. It can also help you find any hard-coded links that a general search and replace tool might have missed. The first thing you need to update as you find these hard-coded links is the internal links to the content. A list of your links should also include media, CSS, and JavaScript files.

Modernize the URL in web properties of Google and Bing

You should update search engines once your website has been redirected. We recommend adding your new domain to Google Search Console, updating your domain in Google Analytics, and adding your new domain to Bing Webmaster Tools. Search engines will be notified that your site has a new domain if you do this, as well as your tracking tool will continue to function seamlessly.

Update the Google Search Console by using Change of Address.

The final step is to use the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console. This will ensure that Google will transfer whatever authority it believes your site has to the new domain.

Go to your old domain’s property in Search Console, and then click Settings on the left near to the bottom menu. Choose Change of Address from Settings will help you get started.

Inside that, there will be two further steps. The first step is to verify that all your old links have 301 redirects in place. The second step involves selecting the domain property for your new site. After selecting the new property, next click on Validate & Update.