Nothing quite prepares you for the day your old domain dies. Maybe the old site had a different name, or a supplier wants the brand to match, or the short domain finally became available. For an e-commerce store the stakes are higher than for a blog, because every product page, every saved bookmark, every printed return label, every link a partner ever posted, all of it points at the old address. Move wrong and organic traffic collapses quietly over a week. Move right and almost none of it is lost. Here is the safe sequence.<\/p>\n
Build the new domain completely, products, pages, apps, payment, test orders all working, before any traffic moves. Do it on a temporary URL or a private staging copy. The old site stays untouched and fully available on its existing domain during this stage, because that is the site your traffic still visits while everything happens around it.<\/p>\n
The biggest cause of traffic loss is not the migration itself, it is a URL that changes shape along the way. On the new domain, decide the slug pattern for every product and collection now. If the old store used A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines a page has permanently moved, and it is the only kind that passes on authority. Every old product and collection page needs one pointing to its new equivalent, exactly page for page. Do not redirect the entire old domain to the new homepage; that throws away everything the individual product pages earned. In practice this means exporting a full list of old URLs, creating the redirect for each one on the new site, and keeping that list as the migration record.<\/p>\n The old domain does not retire on migration day. Renew it, keep DNS running, and let every old address 301 into the new site. How long depends on how many external links point in, from blog posts to printed stickers on packages, but a year is the practical minimum. Dropping the old domain early is where a lot of hard-won equity quietly dies, and for a store whose packaging already says the old name, it can be much longer.<\/p>\n In your search console, use its change-of-address tool to say the site moved from the old domain to the new one. That single submission saves weeks of the engines discovering the move on their own. Then watch the reports for a few weeks: crawl errors on old pages, indexing progress on new pages. Slow decay in old-domain traffic is normal. Sudden collapse on the new domain usually means redirects are broken somewhere specific, and the report will show exactly which page.<\/p>\n Everywhere a customer saw your old address, email footers, packaging slips, social bios, business cards, gets an update pass. A short email to your list announcing the same domain with the same store, nothing changed except the address, is optional but worth sending, because some customers will look for that confirmation before they ever type it.<\/p>\n Shop small and the move is genuinely manageable: the same product pages, the same 301s, the same customers, just addressed differently. The mistakes are all avoidable ones: dropping the old domain before the redirects finish their work, redirecting everything to a homepage, or moving traffic before the new store actually works. Follow the sequence and a fortnight later you check the reports, and the traffic line barely dips.<\/p>\n Want more like this? Join MOKU Club for free. Weekly resources, early access to new guides, and occasional templates you can actually use. Join below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A seven-step ecommerce domain migration that keeps orders and organic traffic: same URL paths, 301 redirects, and a quiet change-of-address.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,59],"tags":[79],"class_list":["post-6994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-design","category-how-to","tag-website-hosting"],"yoast_head":"\nexample-old.com\/products\/item-name<\/code>, keep the exact same path on the new one, so the only thing that changes is the domain itself. Write the rule on one line and give it to whoever builds the pages.<\/p>\nStep 3: Set up 301 redirects for the old pages<\/h2>\n
Step 4: Keep the old domain live and paid for, but pointing<\/h2>\n
Step 5: Do the quiet technical checklist on the new domain<\/h2>\n
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Step 6: Tell search engines you moved<\/h2>\n
Step 7: Ship the update to the humans too<\/h2>\n
What this actually protects<\/h2>\n