Changing Domain: Best Practices?

A few months ago, I started a blog on Ghost on my personal domain. In the last couple of months, the blog has become more successful than I had imagined, gathering over a hundred subscribers and more than 25,000 monthly page views.

Now I’d like to move the blog to a different domain with more authoritative name.

What are the best practices for changing domains without losing subscribers and the search-engine traffic?

Specifically, I’d love to know:

  1. How should I go about changing domain on Ghost (PRO)?
  2. I don’t want to set up another Ghost blog and move all my posts. I want to keep the existing blog and just update the domain. Only the URLs for the articles will need to be changed. Is that possible?
  3. What do I need to do with the subscribers? Do I have to get their permission (opt-in) again for the new domain?
  4. What things should I keep in mind to not have a negative impact on the organic traffic acquired via search-engines? My current blog has almost 15K organic search visits per month, and I’d hate to lose those.

Any help is really appreciated.

Regards,
Akshay

P.S. I’ve been a very happy user of Ghost and recommend it to literally everyone I meet. Thank you so much for building this wonderful product.

Whilst changing a domain name can affect search engine rankings, it doesn’t have to, and may be done safely.

In addition to setting up the new site, you’ll need to consider backlinks and set up redirects. Finally, you’ll need to update search engines with the new domain. This is an important step that has to be done correctly. For instance, using the change of address feature in the Google Search Console.

There are plenty of guides online.

Since you use Ghost (Pro) you can contact support directly by email–see the footer.

Thanks for your answer! I’ll get in touch with the support.

- Akshay