418: Changing Your Domain Name? Here’s What You Should Consider

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what to consider before changing your domain name.

There are multitudes of reasons why a startup might want to change it’s website’s domain name. This could be due to rebranding or switching to something entirely new. While this can be an exciting time for your startup, there are risks to this and it can also be one of the scariest you may ever do for your business.

In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about why close.io purchased the domain name close.com, risks involved when changing a domain name, things to keep in mind before changing a domain name and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic

00:34 Why this topic was chosen.

02:13 The first reason why they purchased close.com.

03:05 The second reason why they purchased close.com.

03:46 The third reason why they purchased close.com.

04:23 Risks involved when changing a domain name.

05:37 Things to keep in mind before changing a domain name.

05:56 What typically happens when people change domain names.

06:50 The biggest thing to do when you change domain.

3 Key Points:

We didn’t want our competition to buy it.We wanted to communicate to our customers that we have matured as a company.Make sure you have a good reason before changing domain.

[0:00:00]
Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.
[0:00:03]
Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.
[0:00:04]
Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat,, we're going to talk about how to change your domain name, should you change your domain name, risks changing your domain name and benefits of changing your domain name. A lot of people have been asking me recently, why close changed from Close that Io Close.com, why we purchased that domain name and what the benefits were that we were looking for. I was surprised, I always felt like people just intuitively know, but apparently, this is still a really big interesting topic. And then we have talked about over the last couple of weeks, multiple times about how the migration to the new domain has gone for us and we've asked you for advice. I felt like we might give people some like, do's and don'ts quickly for those that are in this situation. I'll start and tell people the core reasons why we bought the domain and the benefits and risks. And then I'll throw over to you as some like best practices on what to keep in mind when you change your domain name, especially when it pertains to not losing all your SEO juice and all your organic traffic. Does that sound cool?
[0:01:13]
Hiten Shah: Sounds great.
[0:01:15]
Steli Efti: All right. For us one of the biggest questions people ask me has been, did you buy Close.com because it's going to bring you millions of more traffic? And the answer to that question has always been no, right? I'm sure there might be a domain name that you could purchase, that you could track, that has a ton of traffic and has relevant traffic to your product or service. Right? And then you purchasing that new domain name is an actual growth strategy or a distribution or demand strategy. But that was not the case for us. We didn't think that close.com was getting a lot of like relevant traffic. The reasons that we bought it, where more branding and positioning and more competitive, securing than anything else. A number of things. When we launched in January 2013, we wanted Close.com as our primary home and domain for our brand and product from the get go. We just couldn't buy it, because somebody else owned it that wasn't interested in selling, so we had to settle to the dot io name. And then we always referred to ourselves as Close.io publicly, because we wanted to tell people how to find us and not just what the name is, right? If we had said Close, people would have not known where to go,