Changed the name of a domain even if you were never married.
You know that after marriage you never go back.
Nowadays you can get divorced quite easily but only as a last solution with their respective costs and
pains that you will have to go through similarly.
The domain choice should be something definitive which can certainly change but at a very prohibitive
cost.
Remember that the domain name you choose today will remain forever unless you make a transfer with all
the FCO risks entailed by this action.
Consider it that you might regret a too hasty choice.
Until now I have always avoided changing the domain.
I had to do it only once for branding purposes and it was pretty rough.
In my case I immediately lost 30 percent in terms of traffic but I also read about companies that had
to face losses of up to 80 percent.
It is surely true that after a few months things tend to go back to normal.
But meanwhile we find ourselves suffering a decrease in terms of visitors for a more or less indefinite
period.
In business this is neither positive nor tolerable consider that besides purchasing the new domain you
will need to keep the old one for at least 12 months.
The whole procedure is based on the concept of redirecting all the pages of the old domain to the new
pages of the new property possibly with a one to one match so that the search engine is able to recognize
the old contents already indexed and replace them with new ones you will have to make sure you find
and redirect the old content towards an identical or equivalent web page in the new Web site.
After moving the content to the new Web site remember to verify the ownership of the new domain in the
search console account and use that change address tool this way.
According to Google's Matt Cutts the search engine should maintain at least in theory the same authority
and the same ranking positions of the past and the timing varies based on the number of index pages
and many other factors.
In short after this overview you will have realized that changing domain is certainly a feasible operation
and there are various guides to do it.
But personally I think it should be considered as the last solution because the risk of losing traffic
and ranking positions is really too high.