Moving domain names

Publishing help SEO
1

We are prepping for a rebrand and will be moving to a new domain. We are not changing the site structure at this time.

Does anyone know the correct process and best practices for a domain name change?

Do we need to setup 301s for all content?

The design will vary significantly but we are using our core styles. Is it best to copy the site to a new project or should we work within the same project in staging?

2

Hey Nick,

If it’s the same site, and you’re just changing the domain name you want to use as your primary name, Webflow handles that automatically.

You can just add the new domain on your public site and then set that as your default domain name. Your old domain should remain on the site ( don’t remove it ), Webflow will automatically 301 redirect requests to your old domain, to your new one.

At that point;

  • start using your new domain in your published links
  • old links will continue to function fine
  • search engines will get 301’s on old links, and update gradually
  • add your new domain as a new domain-property in Google Search Console, so you can begin capturing search data. Register your new /sitemap.xml urls as well in that new property.
3

Thank you for the info!

We’ve designed the new site as a separate project in Webflow and will be pointing the new domain name to this new site. Does this mean that we’ll need to manually add 301 redirects from the pages on our existing Webflow project?

4

If your old Webflow site has redirects and you want your new site to have those same redirects, then yes, you’ll need to copy them over from your old hosting plan to your new one.

If you have a lot of them, there are tools to export and import your redirects.

Webflow’s Support may be able to assist with that too.