How Do I Set Up Site Migration to New Domain Without Crashing Traffic

[illmasterj]

Some of you may have seen that I have bought a better branded domain for my niche site.

Current domain: niche-site.com
New domain: nichesite.com

My concern was that if I grow this brand massively (away from just affiliate offers), people would be typing nichesite.com and wouldn't find my site. Or a competitor would snipe my business.

This website is a year or so old, has a DR of less than 10. The new domain has no links pointing to it, no manual actions. It's getting a nice amount of traffic and making me north of $1k per month.

Should I migrate the site to the new domain and suck up the short term loss in traffic (and hope Google treats the site just as well on a new domain)?

Or should I just redirect nichesite.com to niche-site.com and stick with niche-site.com for life?

My thoughts are:

• niche-site.com looks cheap, and it always will
• the website will never have this little traffic, so it's best to rip off the band aid now
• losing that $1k a month will hurt the project right now. I'm reinvesting everything right now so if the traffic drops a lot I will have less to spend

 

[Ryuzaki]

@jjj_, you could move the site to the new domain, 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the exact same pages on the new domain, set up a "site move" in Search Console, and everything should work out just fine, especially since nothing is changing. No text, no templates, no HTML, nothing.

But you never know. You might see some bouncing, you might not. There's more of a chance of it going perfectly smooth than not, but there is a risk.

 

[illmasterj]

There's more of a chance of it going perfectly smooth than not, but there is a risk.

A friend did a migration recently and messed up a lot of things. He lost around 60% of his traffic and has been trying to claw it back since (9 months later).

But, I know this is the right thing to do for the brand long term.

 

[Poplanu]

A friend did a migration recently and messed up a lot of things. He lost around 60% of his traffic and has been trying to claw it back since (9 months later).

But, I know this is the right thing to do for the brand long term.

I've done it once and had some trouble with the search console "new domain" selection. Must have been a bug, because the console just refused to list the non-www version of the new domain. I couldn't find anything on Google about it, domain registrar stuff was validated correctly and all that. The traffic dropped and came back in 1.5 months.

You can always go through the process on a dummy domain with some test posts live on it before doing it on a real site.