Name migration · Redirects and records · an afternoon plus monitoring
How to move a website to a new domain — The Old Name Is Not Finished — It Is Now Infrastructure
You are not retiring a name; you are giving it a second job that it will be doing for as long as anybody has an old link.
The short answer
Moving a site to a new domain means running two names deliberately from now on: the new one serves the site, and the old one exists permanently to redirect visitors, keep receiving mail sent to its addresses, and hold on to the standing it built.
The move itself is an afternoon. What decides whether it costs you traffic is the redirect map — every old address sent to its exact counterpart, never funnelled into the new homepage.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Intermediate
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5
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Free
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Proven
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Two things move at once in a rebrand and they are usually confused: the website, which is a hosting job, and the name, which is a domain job. This page is about the second, and about everything at the old name that still has to work afterwards.
Change one thing at a time. Move the name and leave the hosting alone, or move the hosting and leave the name alone, but never both in a weekend — otherwise no symptom has an obvious cause.
Two names, two jobs, from now on
After the move the new name serves the site, holds the certificate and carries the mail you actually use. The old name keeps resolving, keeps its own certificate, keeps a set of redirects and, for a good while yet, keeps accepting messages sent to its addresses. Both names stay registered and both stay in the renewal budget.
People who plan a rebrand as a switch-off end up rediscovering the old name eighteen months later when a supplier's invoice bounces or a printed leaflet sends somebody nowhere. Plan it as a handover with a long tail and none of that happens.
Page-level redirects, never a homepage funnel
Send a permanent redirect from every old address to its exact match on the new name. This is the single decision that determines whether the migration costs you a few weeks of turbulence or most of your deep traffic.
Pointing everything at the new homepage tells search engines those pages have gone rather than moved, and the deep content carrying most of your traffic falls out of the index within weeks. Build the map from a crawl of the old site so that nothing is left to memory, and test a sample of the deep URLs by hand once it is live.
The records that follow the site — and the ones that stay
The new name needs the full set from day one: A records, the certificate, the MX records for wherever mail is answered, and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC entries that let your outbound mail authenticate. A rebrand is a mail migration whether or not anybody planned it as one, because everybody's address changes on the same day.
The old name keeps its MX records too, for a year at least. Customers, suppliers and every printed document will go on using old addresses long after the announcement, and a bounce from an address somebody has used for years is a worse first impression than the rebrand was ever going to be a good one.
Telling the machines what happened
Use the change-of-address tool in Search Console alongside the redirects, keep both properties verified, and submit the new sitemap. The redirects do the actual work; this simply prepares the search engine to expect them and speeds up the reconciliation.
Check the canonical tags on the new site point at the new name, and that no plugin, cache or hardcoded absolute URL is still emitting the old one. A site that redirects correctly at the server and advertises the old name in its own markup gives search engines two contradictory statements to reconcile.
The old name's standing budget. Renew it indefinitely. External links, citations, directory entries and bookmarks decay very slowly, and each one keeps sending people for exactly as long as the redirect answers. Treat the old registration as a line in the annual budget rather than an expense to be reviewed.
Keep its certificate valid too, because a browser upgrading an old bookmark to https has to complete the handshake before any redirect can run. An expired certificate on a retired name turns every one of those arrivals into a warning page.
The platform that answers for the name
Hosted somewhere else already? We move the whole site at no charge, usually within 24 hours, and it goes on answering visitors throughout.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier, the smallest plan included — that is the floor here rather than an upgrade.
- Registry, registrar and DNS host kept apart
- The record named before you go looking for it
- Delegation and zone edits on one screen
- People on the desk at any hour a name misbehaves
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
The old name given a job, not a funeral
Redirects, certificate, mail and renewals — everything the retired name still has to do, listed explicitly.
A redirect map rather than a redirect
Page to matching page, built from a crawl, because the homepage funnel is what actually costs the traffic.
Mail treated as part of the move
Every address changes on the same day, so MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are handled on both names rather than one.
One change at a time
Domain or hosting, never both in a weekend, so that any symptom still has an identifiable cause.
The markup checked as well as the server
Canonical tags and hardcoded URLs, because contradicting your own redirects slows the whole thing down.
Migration help on the account
Where the site is moving hosts as well as names, our engineers bring it across at no charge.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Crawl the old site and build the redirect map first
List every URL that currently exists and write its counterpart on the new name beside it. Doing this before anything moves is what stops the map being reconstructed from memory afterwards, which is where deep pages get lost.
- 2
Stand the site up on the new name and check it privately
Attach the new name to the account, correct internal links and the platform's own site-address settings, and walk the whole thing yourself under the new name before anybody else does.
- 3
Publish the records the new name needs
A records, the certificate, the MX set for wherever mail is answered, and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC entries to match. Everyone's email address changes today, so this is a mail migration as much as a web one.
- 4
Switch the redirects on and tell the search engines
Turn on the page-level permanent redirects, submit the change of address in Search Console, keep both properties verified, and submit the new sitemap. Then test a sample of deep URLs by hand.
- 5
Keep the old name working indefinitely
Renew it, keep its certificate valid so https arrivals complete their handshake, keep its MX records for at least a year, and leave the redirects running permanently. This is plumbing now, not launch scaffolding.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- Renewals billed at the figure you registered at
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old certificate lapses
- Full zone control — A, CNAME, MX and TXT — from the panel
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- Staging copies for trying a change before it reaches a visitor
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
How long do I have to keep the old name?
Indefinitely, if you can. Links, citations and bookmarks decay over years rather than months, and each one keeps sending visitors for exactly as long as the redirect answers. The registration is a small standing cost against traffic that would otherwise simply stop arriving.
Do my email addresses change when the domain does?
Yes — every address at the old name becomes an address at the new one, which makes a rebrand a mail migration as well. Publish MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new name before launch, and keep the old name's MX records live for at least a year so nothing sent to the old addresses bounces.
Should the old name keep its certificate?
Yes. Anybody following an old bookmark over https has to complete the encrypted handshake with the old name before the redirect can run. Let the certificate lapse and those visitors get a security warning instead of being forwarded, which is the least dignified possible end to a rebrand.
Can I move the name and the hosting in the same weekend?
You can, but you will not be able to tell which change caused which symptom, and both changes have tails measured in days. Move one, confirm everything resolves and delivers, then move the other. The extra week costs far less than the diagnosis.
Keep reading
VPS Hosting
VPS capacity for a site whose traffic has outgrown a shared account mid-rebrand.
Domain Names
Search, register and transfer names — including the one you are retiring and keeping forever.
Changing provider? Work through this checklist beforehand.
A straightforward running order for a migration your visitors never spot: which files travel first, how to bring the mail across without dropping a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two errors that sit behind almost every outage we get called in to fix.
Two names, one audience.
The registrant record in your own name, the first year included on annual hosting, renewals at the rate you registered at, and people on the desk at any hour.
View Domain Names plans