In this post I will talk about what I learned when I recently moved my WordPress blog to a new domain name.

Moving my WordPress Blog to new Domain

Recently I moved this blog to a new domain name I had bought. The reason for this was that I wanted to have an international domain name instead of my old domain: techwork.dk (Danish) domain, that I started this blog out with back in 2010. When I started this blog, I was not aware of, how much the domain name matters regarding ranking and keywords.

My Step-by-Step plan

Before you start with a big project like, changing to a new domain name after almost 10 years, it is a good idea to have a detailed plan. A plan that in details states, what steps need to be done, but also in what order they need to be done. The order of the things you do, might be crucial for a plan like this. You can read all about my Step-by-step plan in my post about how I changed my domain name on my blog

What I expected would happen?

I was fully aware that this would be a lot of work to make this change work. I was also expecting that I would lose traffic with a move like this, because a new domain take time to be discovered, approved and trusted be Search Engines. Of cause the plan was that I should get the traffic back over time and more than that. That was one of my main goal with this process. With a .net domain it should be possible to rank better on Search Engines and that way get more international traffic to my new domain over time. The big questions were: How long time would it take?

How it actually went

Traffic

Yep, my traffic did drop, but actually not that much and with the redirect from my old domain I was pretty fast back on my normal traffic. However, I could see that most of my traffic came from the old domain and not because of my new domain. I still have a lot to do with link-building and branding my new domain name. I might also consider to keep my old domain name for at least another year. It will take a long time before all my traffic will be moved to my new domain. Only times will tell how much impact my new domain name will help me to drive more traffic to this blog and to rank higher and better by search engines.

AdSense

When you approve a new domain to the AdSense program, Google say that it would normally take a few days, but in some cases up to 2 weeks. In my case 2 weeks was not enough and it is still not approved or rejected for this matter. It is just saying Getting Ready!

For me, that have very limited income from AdSense it is not that big a problem, but if I had based my monthly income on AdSense, two weeks without any income would have been a very big issue. Be aware of that if you are going to move to a new domain. Only Google knows when your new domain will be approved. Because I have redirected all traffic from my old domain to my new with 301 redirect, there is no income at all on my old domain. I could of cause have waited with the redirect of my old domain to the new one until the new domain was approved, but I was afraid that Google would penalize me for duplicate content and I was not expecting it to take that long at all.

• 12 days after I added my domain to my AdSense account, I am still waiting for Google to review my new domain/blog.
• 13 days after I added my domain, I got this message below from the Google AdSense team:
• 21 days after I applied to get my new domain reviewed for AdSense ads, but the messages from Google is still the same.
• Update: 24 day, should it take to get my new domain approved, but now it has been approved in first try 🙂

I will keep you updated about my AdSense approval here on this blogpost as soon as I have new information from the Google AdSense Team.

Social Media – New domain

Regarding my Social Media accounts, it was not that big an issue. A new Bio with link to the new URL and some new loges and I was good to go again. I was able to change the name in my Facebook fan page URL so it matches my new domain name. The good thing about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is that my audience is the same and I still have all my followers. It would have been another story if I should start all over building a new audience from scratch.

All the services I had forgot I used 

One thing that I was surprised about was all the accounts I had made over the years on forums, websites and tools to promote my blog. I had made a list with all the obvious accounts I need to change like: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Triberr and so on, but I found out that there was so many more, when I first got started. Services and accounts, with backlinks back to my blog that I wanted to change to point directly to my new domain. Some of the site had I not visit for a very long times and I few did not existed anymore.

What I have learned

So, what did I learned by moving to a new domain for this blog? First of all, I learned that it is a lot of work and that I am really glad that I took the time to make a good plan before I started. I also learned that it is not something you just do one an afternoon. I have also learned that it takes patience before you can see the result of all the hard work. It takes times to build trust and credit for a brand-new domain name. It also takes time before everything is indexed and you can see if you have made any mistake. It takes even more time to fix the mistake and test if it has made any difference. 

Conclusion on moving to a new domain

The conclusion for this process has to be: If you prepare good, are willing to make all the hard work and have patience to wait for the result can pay off to switch to a new and better domain name. It will take time before you can see the result of all your hard work. It will not just come over night.