How Can I Change My Domain Name

Can I Change The Domain Name Of My Shopify Store

In this block lets consider the situation where you want to change the domain name of your Shopify store. Answering the question in the name of this section Yes, you can change domain name!

First of all, note that this step is only available in the following situations:

• You have already bought a domain withing Shopify.
• You have connected the existing domain.

So, what should you do? Follow the instruction below and you can do this in a few minutes!

Why Change Your Primary Domain

There are several reasons why you might want to change the primary domain of your account. The first is that you would users on your account to log into their accounts with a new primary domain name. You also might have lost ownership of the old domain and need to remove that from your account. You might also want to use the Google App Engine, this can authenticate via the user accounts on the primary domain.

You might also want to have more consistent branding in the Drive shares and Calendar invites. This will show in the users primary email address. Consistent branding can be useful for building good relationships across your brand.

Update All The Things

Doing a full rebrand requires updates of:

• Google My Business Profile, social media profiles, and other significant sources of traffic
• internal documents
• product packaging
• signage

You wont get everything overnight. Thats ok. This takes time. Think of it more as a treasure hunt – see how many of your employees can find places that have your old domain!

There you have it. Good luck with your domain name makeover!

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Do A Full Analysis Of Your Content And Make Sure It Is Optimized For Search Engines

The last thing you want is to spend weeks optimizing your content after the fact. The better shape your content is from a quality and SEO standpoint beforehand, the easier the transition will be, and the less the impact will be on your search results.

This is a great free resource for making sure your content is in good shape.

If you have a larger site, Id recommend picking up a service like SEMrush for at least a couple months to do all of the initial and post site analysis to make sure nothing weird is going on. Heres our full SEMrush review.

Choose A New Domain Name And Assign It To Your Website

Choosing a new domain name is a highly personal decision, but there are a few aspects to keep in mind to ensure you make a smart one. Weve previously devoted an entire article to walk you through that process, so check it out before settling on a new domain.

When youre ready, you can register your new domain through our platform. If youre an A2 Hosting customer, you can simply assign that name to your existing website. However, for other hosts youll need to dig into their knowledge bases to find the correct process.

Read Also: How To Choose My Domain Name

Change Your Email Address To Use Your Custom Domain

• 10/6/2021

Check the Domains FAQ if you don’t find what you’re looking for.

Your initial email address in Microsoft 365 includes .onmicrosoft.com, like tom@fourthcoffee.onmicrosoft.com. You can change it to a friendlier address like tom@fourthcoffee.com. You’ll need your own domain name, like fourthcoffee.com first. If you already have one, great! If not, you can learn how to buy one from a domain registrar.

Your initial email address in Office 365 Germany includes .onmicrosoft.de, like tom@fourthcoffee.onmicrosoft.de. You can change it to a friendlier address like tom@fourthcoffee.de. You’ll need your own domain name, like fourthcoffee.de first. If you already have one, great! If not, you can learn how to buy one from a domain registrar.

Your initial email address in Office 365 operated by 21Vianet includes partner.onmschina.cn, like tom@fourthcoffee.partner.onmschina.cn. You can change it to a friendlier address like tom@fourthcoffee.cn. You’ll need your own domain name, like fourthcoffee.cn first. If you already have one, great! If not, you can learn how to buy one from a domain registrar.

Connect Domain Via Website Admin

2. On the left side, you will see the menu where you should open the Online Store section.

3. In the opened menu click on Domains.

4. Click the Connect existing domain.

5. In the appeared window enter the name of your domain and click Next.

Note, that you can connect your domains automatically if you use the following services: GoDaddy, Google Domains, and 1& 1 IONOS. Therefore, when you click Next , you will see the button Connect automatically. Click on it and the name will be connected.

After that, go to your GoDaddy, Google Domains, or 1& 1 IONOS and log in. Click Connect near the domain.

In other cases, you should connect it manually. In the Shopify Help Center, you will find the instruction on How to connect domains manually.

Lets return to our instruction. On Step 5 youve saved the domain name but now you should activate it. To do this you need to change the domains DNS settings in order to point to Shopifys servers. The detailed instruction is available in the Shopify Help Center How to set up an existing domain to connect to Shopify?

There is also an option that allows transferring domains. The instruction about this feature you can find in the Shopify Help Center Transferring a domain.

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Change Domain Via Website Admin

2. On the left side, you will see the Online Store section. Click on it.

3. In the opened menu click on Domains.

4. On the top of the page, you will see different buttons. You should click on the Change primary domain.

5. Now select the domain from the list and click Save.

Your primary domain will be changed immediately. If someday you want to change it again, just repeat the steps described above.

S You Need To Take When Undergoing A Website Domain Change

Recently, a well established client who is a global leader in their industry decided that they need to change their domain to better align with their updated business strategy. While we initially recommended against the URL change, since there would be relatively low perceived benefit, we understood the need as well. We took the time to dig deeper into the issue and looked at the businesss goals, ideal target audience, and long term plans they had.

Once it was established that the change was necessary, we took all possible steps to reduce the risk associated with a domain name change for a small business late in the game.

Here are some of the steps we took to make the domain change as easy and successful as possible:

1. We first changed the business email domain. This step can get easily overlooked. With the amount of existing traffic for this particular small business, missing it would have caused confusion for the business and web visitors if they couldnt get in touch with each other. We updated all the contact records to the new business domain on the existing site before we completed the actual domain transition to ensure continuity after the change.

4. We Updated Google Search Console. Make sure you only update Google Search Console AFTER youve actually changed the domain URL address. Once youre in Search Console, you need to verify your new domain name and address, and list it as a property you own.

Also Check: How To Find A Website Domain

Change Your Url Within WordPress

Your first task is to physically change your sites URL within WordPress. However, this step comes with a word of warning. Once you save your changes, your sites back end wont be accessible until youve completed the rest of this procedure.

To begin, log into WordPress, and navigate to the General > Settings screen:

This screen contains global settings for your WordPress site. The fields were interested in are WordPress Address and Site Address :

To change your URL, simply type the new address into both of these fields, and click on Save Changes. As we mentioned, this will make your site temporarily inaccessible.

Rename Users With Your New Domain

Youll change each users email address to use the new domain name. Before you start, review the impact of changing a username.

Important: When you rename your own admin account, youll be automatically signed out. You then sign in with your new username.

Tip: If you have many users, you can use a spreadsheet to change usernames.

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Keep The Old Site Live For A Little While

Dont use the day your old domain name expires as the launch day of your new one. You will need to allow for a transition period where people trying to access the old site will be able to discover your new one. Once your 301 redirects have been set up, there isnt much harm in keeping the old one around. At the very least keep your old domain until it expires, but it might even be worthwhile to renew it for another year, especially if it wont cost too much.

Buy Your New Domain Early

This one is fairly obvious because how would you change your domain name without having a new one to change it to? Besides this necessary reason, there is another reason why you will want to get your new domain well in advance: SEO.

The longer you have your new domain up and running, the more of a chance you will be giving search engines to crawl your new site. Once youve acquired your new domain, give it a coming soon page telling search engines that a new site will be there shortly. This will give search engines something more substantial to crawl, and will also tell them that it is not a parked domain so they should pay closer attention to it.

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How To Use Bings Site Move Tool

Before moving forward, make sure your current domain is already added and verified within Bing Webmaster Tools.

Step One: Setup a 301 permanent redirect from your old domain name to the new one. This is the fundamental step.

Step Two: Login to your Bing Webmaster Tools account. Add and verify the new domain name.

Step Three: Click on the old domain name within Bing Webmaster Tools. Then under Diagnostic & Tools select Site Move.

Step Four: Select the radio button that says I am moving URLs from this site to another verified site.

Step Five: Click on select destination site and select your new domain name.

Step Six: Change Scope to be Domain and then click Submit

You have now successfully informed Google and Bing about your domain name switch. This will help ensure that you dont lose any established keyword rankings. This also helps both search engines speed up the indexing process and understanding of your website under the new domain name.

What You Should Know About The Domain Name

Domain name its the address of your website on the Internet.

According to the official statistics, there are over 350 million registered domains. Therefore, if you want your customers to remember and find you without problems, your domain name should be as simple and memorable as possible. So, it sometimes takes hours or even days to select the domain name for the store, website, blog, etc.

There are a few recommendations that can help you to choose a good address:

• Simple and short. Avoid long and difficult-to-pronounce names. It will be easier to remember a short and simple domain name.
• No digits. Usually, its better to use words. However, if you have digits in the name of your brand, surely you can use them in your domain.

So, your decision was to make a Shopify store. Let us show you how you can buy, connect, or change domain names. Below you will find our step-by-step instructions.

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Make Sure The Destination Domain Has A Clean Past

Skip this step if youve just purchased an entirely new domain name. This information only applies when you bought an older domain from someone else or at a domain auction.

Switching to an existing domain that already has a past is like buying an old house. You first have to check for any structural damage and to make sure its not haunted 🙂

Youd search for the domain on archive.org to get a history of what actual website pages were displayed on it. If you do get results, take a close look at them. Any spam or low-quality content?

To be really thorough, you could also search for the domain using ahrefs Backlink Checker tool.

The free version of their tool allows you to see a small set of backlinks for that domain, and to get an idea of its overall history.

And if theres something live on the domain already , you could also . That will tell you how well its been indexed by Google and if there were any manual penalty actions taken against your domain .

If you do notice any manual actions applied to your domain name in the past, you have to stop here and address those problems first, and then file a reconsideration request to have Google lift those penalties.

Further reading on this sub-topic:

Connect Domain Via The Shopify Mobile App

Now, we will show you how to connect domains by using the Shopify mobile application.

2. Find the Sales channels section and press on the Online Store.

3. In the menu choose Domains.

4. There are two buttons. Tap on the Connect existing domain button.

5. In the search field type a domain name that you want to connect and click on Next.

Congratulations! Youve added the existing domain to the Shopify store. But it doesnt work. To activate it you need to make a few additional actions with domain DNS settings.

So, go to the dashboard of your domain provider. Choose the domain that you connected to Shopify and click Manage .

Now you need A and CNAME records. Firstly, edit an A record and point it to the Shopify IP address 23.227.38.32. Here you also should set the lowest time for TTL .

The next step edit or create the CNAME record. Now you need to point it to shops.myshopify.com and set the lowest time for TTL as in the previous step. In 48 72 hours your domain will be verified. When you get a notification and successful verification, go to the Shopify mobile app => Store icon => Online stores => Domains. Click on Change primary domain and select the name you want to use.

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