Changing company name, moving Squarespace site to new domain

Hi, everyone!

I did a quick to search to see if this topic has been covered before, but I can't seem to find anything on it.

I am exploring the idea of broadening my business niche and therefore changing the name of my business/website.

The new business will include everything the old site has, but more things in the same category.  For example, let's say the old site was about fruit. The new site will be about produce, in general.  All of the old content will remain and fit within the umbrella of the new content, with more things surrounding it.

I would have to move my site to a new domain, but I want to make sure all the organic traffic I get from Google is carried over properly.

It seems like such a huge task, I don't know where to start. I am also worried that I could go through all the trouble, and for some weird reason, Google search traffic won't start flowing to the new site like I had hoped.

Does anybody have experience with this?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
 

Traffic to your old domain will not automatically move to your new one, not through the search engines anyway unless you keep it pointed to your site. You can make your new domain the primary domain and it will show up in the browser bar of anyone who visits, the old one will change to the new one,  and the search engines will eventually catch on to the change. At some point in the future, you should be able to deactivate the original domain if you find that desirable. 

@blackstarNL  Are you keeping a lot of the same content and adding more pages, or are you reworking everything? 

23 minutes ago, derricksrandomviews said:

Traffic to your old domain will not automatically move to your new one, not through the search engines anyway unless you keep it pointed to your site. You can make your new domain the primary domain and it will show up in the browser bar of anyone who visits, the old one will change to the new one,  and the search engines will eventually catch on to the change. At some point in the future, you should be able to deactivate the original domain if you find that desirable. 

Do you know of any trusted resources that could help me out with this process?

23 minutes ago, WCS said:

@blackstarNL  Are you keeping a lot of the same content and adding more pages, or are you reworking everything? 

Keeping the majority of the old content and adding more pages under a new name and domain!

1 hour ago, blackstarNL said:

Do you know of any trusted resources that could help me out with this process?

It's simple enough, purchase your new domain through Squarspace, and make it your primary one, and leave your existing domain as is. 

Using multiple domains connected to the same site.

Hi @blackstarNL you'll also want to refer to Google's documentation on site moves/migrations: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes

On 2/29/2024 at 5:12 PM, derricksrandomviews said:

It's simple enough, purchase your new domain through Squarspace, and make it your primary one, and leave your existing domain as is. 

Using multiple domains connected to the same site.

Awesome. Thank you!

On 3/1/2024 at 1:37 AM, Collaborada said:

Hi @blackstarNL you'll also want to refer to Google's documentation on site moves/migrations: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes

Will do! Thank you very much.

I have a related issue but slightly different. I have a photography site here on squarespace that doesn't give me any income. Meanwhile, I have a youtube channel that I am building a course for and a newsletter. Currently I have a domain registered that points to my photography page for now. I'd like to make the new domain the primary one. I would then point my photography page to the same website or perhaps somewhere else. I'm not concerned about losing the content on my photography page.  What would I need to do?