A domain move only costs you rankings when it's done halfway. Done completely, search engines treat it as a change of address and carry the old site's standing over. The redirect is the backbone of it — here's the full checklist in the order the steps actually happen.
Before launch
- New site fully live on its own domain — crawlable, HTTPS on, content in place. Redirects point visitors; they don't ferry a half-built site.
- Inventory the old site's URLs — the pages search engines actually know about (Search Console, a crawl, or your sitemap). This becomes your test list.
- Decide 301. A migration is the definition of permanent — see 301 vs 302 for why anything else works against you.
The redirect itself
- One full-domain redirect, 301 from old to new — the walkthrough is in redirecting an entire domain.
- Path forwarding ON, so every old deep URL lands on its new counterpart instead of the homepage. This single toggle preserves most of the ranking value — deep links are where the equity lives.
- Include www, so both variants of the old address are covered by the same rule.
- Redirect directly — old domain straight to new domain, never chained through an intermediate redirector. Every extra hop leaks a little trust and adds latency.
Launch week
- Test the inventory from your before-list — old URL in, correct new page out, including query strings.
- Update the new site's canonicals to the new domain, and resubmit its sitemap in Search Console. The old domain's sitemap can stay; it now correctly points through the redirects.
- Use Search Console's change-of-address tool for the domain-level move.
- Fix internal links on the new site that still point at old URLs — redirects cover visitors, but direct links are cleaner and faster.
The weeks after
- Watch the redirect's analytics — old-domain traffic should keep flowing and slowly taper as search catches up, not drop to zero overnight.
- Watch Search Console on both properties — crawl errors on the old domain mean a URL the redirect isn't covering; a page or a forwarding rule fixes it.
- Keep the old domain registered and the redirect alive for years. The most common migration failure isn't a mistake — it's letting the old domain expire six months in.