Sometimes your business goes through a rebrand or you decide to purchase a domain name that is better suited to your business. Domain name relocations can be disastrous to your SEO when not done correctly. Our team at Qode Media is able to effectively help your business migrate to a new domain name while following a comprehensive list of steps to try and preserve your SEO. Below are a few tips from our SEO team when trying to change your domain names yourself.

Contact your web host first
Always contact your website host before making any changes to your site and let them know exactly what you plan on doing. They could recommend a specific set of steps that seem to work well with their hosting system or just simple double check your domain and site configuration to make sure there’s nothing technically wrong that could jeopardize your migration.

Back up your site
Regularly back up your site, but definitely do it before making any sort of domain changes. In the event that something goes terribly wrong, you’ll want to make sure that you have a backup. Websites could become incredibly corrupt if something was to time out during the migration or if there was a power outage. Always have a backup.

Change the setting for WordPress
Inside your general settings in WordPress, there’s two setting that allow you to change the “Wordpress address” and “Site address”. Make sure you change both of these so that Wordress knows exactly what domain it should be pointing to.

Change all internal linking
Changing all of your internal linking to reflect your new domain is key. This process can be extremely easy especially if using a third party plugin. It’s important to make sure all inner linking is changed to your new domain as to avoid any broken backlinks.
These simple tips can definitely help you in making your change to a new domain. For optimal results contact Qode Media and have one of our SEO specialists take care of your website migration. Qode Media is the best SEO and Internet marketing company in Toronto, providing low-cost SEO services. Contact us today by using our online form or by giving us a call at 416-208-0157.