A domain name can outgrow your business. Mine did. My online shop started as a subdomain of my portfolio — shop.bernadomyrtil.com — which was fine when the store was a side experiment. Once it became a real catalog with its own customers and an affiliate program, it needed its own home: myrtil.store.

The move itself took an afternoon. The risk was never technical. The risk was Google. My product pages had started earning their place in search results, and a careless domain move is one of the fastest ways to throw that away. Search engines treat a new domain as a stranger. Your job during a move is to prove, page by page, that the stranger is the same business wearing a new address.

Here is exactly how I did it, and what I would check on any client site doing the same.

Step 1: Redirect every page to its twin — not to the homepage

This is the step that decides everything. When someone (or Google) visits an old address, the server should answer with a 301 redirect to the same page on the new domain:

  1. shop.bernadomyrtil.com/en/products/digital-marketing-course → myrtil.store/en/products/digital-marketing-course

A 301 tells Google the move is permanent and that the new page should inherit the old page's place in the index. What you must not do is redirect everything to the new homepage. That is the single most common migration mistake I see: the owner sets one blanket redirect, feels relieved that the old domain "works," and quietly loses every product page, article, and ranking they had — because Google was told all of those pages now live at one address, and one address can only rank as itself.

Test your redirects the way Google experiences them. I checked the homepage, a product page with and without the language prefix, and even the old sitemap address. Every one answered with a 301 to its exact twin. If a single important page redirects to the wrong place, fix it before you announce anything.

Step 2: Make the new site provably clean before you tell Google about it

Before Search Console enters the picture, the new domain has to stand on its own:

  1. robots.txt allows crawling and points to the sitemap.
  2. The sitemap lists only new-domain URLs. Mine had 63 — every product and page on myrtil.store, and not a single leftover address from the old domain.
  3. Canonical tags point to the new domain. Each product page declares itself, on myrtil.store, as the original. If your templates still canonicalize to the old domain, you are telling Google to ignore your new site — check this in the page source, not in your intentions.
  4. Pages ask to be indexed. It sounds obvious, but verify the robots meta tag says index, follow on the pages that matter, especially if the new site spent any time behind a "coming soon" state.

Step 3: Verify the new domain in Search Console — before you need it

Here was my own gap, and I suspect it's common: I had never verified myrtil.store in Google Search Console. My old domain was verified years ago. The new one wasn't — which meant no sitemap submitted, no indexing data, and no way to file the most useful document in a domain move.

Verification doesn't require touching your website's code. I used the DNS method: Google gives you a TXT record, you add it at your domain registrar, and you click Verify. A few warnings from experience:

  1. Don't delete that TXT record afterward. It's what keeps your ownership verified. It costs nothing and harms nothing sitting in your DNS.
  2. If your app platform pauses deployments (mine did at the time), DNS verification is the route that doesn't depend on shipping code at all.

Once verified, submit the sitemap immediately. Google confirmed mine with all 63 pages discovered. That submission is your new site saying: here is everything I have — come and index it at these addresses.

Step 4: File the Change of Address — at the right scope

Search Console has a Change of Address tool that formally tells Google "this site moved there." It exists to speed up the transfer and remove ambiguity. Use it — but scope it correctly, because this is where I nearly made an expensive mistake.

My first attempt was from my main domain's property, bernadomyrtil.com. That property covers everything: the portfolio, the blog subdomain, the project subdomain, and the shop. Filing a change of address from there would have told Google my entire domain — including the portfolio I was not moving — had relocated to myrtil.store. Google's own validation actually failed the request, because the portfolio homepage doesn't redirect to the store (it shouldn't!), and that failure protected me.

The shop needed its own property. I added a property for exactly shop.bernadomyrtil.com, filed the change of address from there to myrtil.store, and Google passed both of its checks instantly: the homepage 301 was in place, and I owned both sites. The migration was marked in progress the same day, scoped to exactly the part of my web presence that had moved.

The lesson generalizes: move properties at the same level you moved the site. A subdomain move gets a subdomain property. Never file a domain-wide move for a subdomain's relocation.

Step 5: Keep the old redirects alive — and watch the transfer

A domain move is not finished when the forms are submitted. Google transfers indexing page by page over days and weeks. During that window:

  1. Keep the 301 redirects running. Google recommends at least 180 days; I intend to keep mine permanently. The old subdomain costs me nothing, and old links scattered around the web keep landing in the right place.
  2. Update what you control. Internal links, social profiles, email signatures, directory listings — anything pointing to the old address should point to the new one, so visitors and crawlers aren't depending on redirects forever.
  3. Watch Search Console on the new property. The Pages report shows indexing filling in. A slow climb over the first week is normal; a flat zero after two weeks is a signal to investigate.

What the move taught me

The technical work in a domain migration is small: redirects, a sitemap, two Search Console filings. The discipline is in the details — page-for-page redirects instead of a blanket one, canonicals checked in the source, and a change of address scoped to what actually moved.

If you're planning a move, do the unglamorous checks in order and Google will follow you to the new address. Skip them, and you'll spend months wondering why your traffic quietly moved out instead.