This week I’ve seen some sad posts by music teachers who decided to change their domain name and/or website and destroyed their previously high google rankings in the process.
Neither a domain name change nor launching a new website under your old domain name should negatively impact your search engine rankings, if you work with an expert to ensure a smooth transition.
One of those teachers changed domain name as a result of rebranding their business, and didn’t redirect the old domain to the new one… which is the work of a matter of minutes! With their old domain name still registered, that issue could have been salvageable and fixed very quickly. However, with an attitude of “it’s too hard and I don’t want to understand – what’s done is done!” (even with offering to help them for free!), sadly they’ve ended up going from a website that ranked well to one that’s going to take a long time to rebuild those previous rankings.
The other moved from WordPress to Canva, which turned out to be SEO suicide of a scale worse than what I’ve seen previously with Wix websites. Hint: you don’t want the actual text of your website to appear all the way down on line 84,000 of the source code of the website.
Sadly this one isn’t salvageable – I’d kill the Canva site and move back to WordPress. I personally find WordPress to be one of the most user-friendly content management systems, and find it surprising when others comment that they find it too confusing.
If you would like to learn more about the ins and outs of WordPress, I’m presenting a highly interactive webinar on WordPress Websites on 21st May 2023.
I’ve just launched my first online course – Sourcing Local Students without breaking the bank! The next few courses on the Successful Music Studio will be dedicated to websites!
If your website does rank well, be careful before making drastic changes, unless you know what you are doing when it comes to search engine optimization! If in doubt, seek professional advice!