Changing your domain is one of the riskiest things you can do to organic search traffic, and one of the most survivable if you do it methodically. Every ranking you hold is attached to a specific URL. Move to a new domain without carrying those URLs across correctly and you are asking search engines to rediscover, re-evaluate and re-rank your whole site from scratch. Done well, a migration transfers ranking signals to the new URLs with only a brief, recoverable dip. Done carelessly, it is a self-inflicted deindexing.
Build a 1:1 redirect map first
Before you touch DNS, produce an exhaustive list of every URL on the old site — from your CMS, your XML sitemaps, your server logs and a full crawl — and map each one to its exact equivalent on the new domain. The goal is a one-to-one mapping: old.com/pricing to new.com/pricing, not old.com/pricing to the new home page. Redirecting large numbers of deep pages to the root is the single most common way migrations bleed rankings, because a home-page redirect tells the crawler the old page has effectively ceased to exist rather than moved. Where the URL structure genuinely changes, map to the closest matching page. Only redirect to the home page as a last resort for content that has no successor.
Use permanent redirects
Every mapped URL should return an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently (or a 308 where request methods other than GET must be preserved). The permanent status is what instructs search engines to transfer ranking signals from the old URL to the new one and to swap the indexed URL over time. A 302 says the move is temporary, so the old URL stays indexed and the new one never fully inherits its authority — exactly the wrong signal for a permanent move. If you are unsure which status a rule is emitting, our TLS Studio sibling covers certificates, and this site's checker will label each hop's status code so you can confirm every migrated URL answers with a clean single 301.
Keep the old domain — and its certificate — alive
The old domain must keep serving those redirects for a long time. Search engines re-crawl old URLs for months, and inbound links from other sites will point at the old domain effectively forever. A practical minimum is to keep the redirects live for at least a year; ideally, keep them indefinitely, because a link that still resolves is link equity you still own. Do not let the old domain registration lapse the week after launch.
Critically, the old domain still needs a valid TLS certificate. A redirect from https://old.com/page only works if the browser or crawler can complete the TLS handshake with old.com first — an expired or missing certificate means the request fails before it ever sees your 301. Keep the old certificate renewing on autopilot and confirm it stays valid with TLS Studio. If the old domain had HSTS, keep serving Strict-Transport-Security from it too, and verify it with HSTS Studio, otherwise browsers that remember the policy may refuse to connect over anything but valid HTTPS.
Update canonicals, sitemaps and internal links
On the new site, every rel="canonical" tag must point at the new URL, not a leftover reference to the old domain. Stale canonicals that still name the old host will actively fight your redirects and confuse consolidation. Generate a fresh XML sitemap listing only the new URLs and submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. As a deliberate, temporary measure, some teams also keep the old sitemap accessible so crawlers rediscover the old URLs quickly and hit the redirects sooner — but the new sitemap is the one that should list live, indexable pages. Update every internal link, canonical reference, hreflang annotation and structured-data URL to the new domain so you are not routing your own users and bots through the redirects unnecessarily.
Tell the search engines directly
Register the new domain as a separate property in Google Search Console and use the Change of Address tool, which explicitly signals a site move and speeds consolidation. Verify both properties. Keep the old property connected so you can watch the old URLs drop out of the index and the new ones climb in, which is your clearest evidence the migration is being understood.
Where you can, reach out to the highest-value sites linking to you and ask them to update their links to the new domain directly. Redirects will carry the signal regardless, but a direct link removes a hop, is more robust against a rule breaking years from now, and consolidates authority immediately rather than through months of re-crawling. Focus this effort on the handful of links that drive the most equity — it is not worth chasing every one.
Launch, then monitor relentlessly
The work is not finished at cutover. In the days after launch, crawl the full old-URL list and confirm each returns a single 301 to the correct new URL with no chains, no loops and no 404s. Watch Search Console's coverage and performance reports for spikes in crawl errors, soft 404s or sudden ranking drops on specific templates — those usually point at a mismapped rule you can fix immediately. Expect a modest, temporary dip in traffic as signals transfer; a well-executed migration typically recovers within a few weeks. A dip that keeps deepening is a symptom, not the normal cost of moving, and almost always traces back to a redirect that is missing, temporary or pointing at the wrong place. Keep tracing the chains until every old URL lands cleanly on its new home.