Frequently Asked Questions

You tell us you're interested, and the domain transfers to you through an escrow service. Escrow holds your payment, the domain moves into your account, escrow confirms it, and then the payment releases. Most transfers wrap up within a few business days. We can advise on the technical side: DNS, email forwarding, and redirects.

Everything is held in escrow, one way or another. Depending on what suits you, the transaction runs through Escrow.com, GoDaddy's transaction service, or another established escrow provider. The escrow service holds your payment, the domain moves into your account, the service confirms the transfer, and only then is the payment released. If a transfer doesn't complete, the funds are returned. You never send money directly to us, and you can confirm the domain is ours before anything starts.

No. Your current email keeps working throughout. The new domain can forward to your existing mailbox, or it can be added to your current email provider (Gmail, Outlook, or whoever hosts it). We can walk you through it.

No. The new domain can redirect to your existing website in minutes, or your site can be moved to the new domain when you're ready. Either way your current site keeps running the whole time.

Typically 1 to 5 business days once escrow is initiated. Some transfers complete in a few hours.

No. Many businesses point the new domain at their existing site first and migrate later, on their own schedule.

That's the most common situation. Redirect the new domain to your existing site immediately, or migrate fully when you're ready. Both work, and we can help with either.

You or whoever manages your website can. DNS records, email forwarding, and redirects are a short job for anyone who has done it before. If you'd rather not touch it, we can walk you through each step.

No. The domain can be transferred to whichever registrar you prefer: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, or any other.

GoDaddy's lease-to-own program lets you make monthly payments while using the domain immediately. At the end of the term, you own it outright. It's an option if you prefer to spread the cost over time.

DNS is the set of records that tells the internet where your domain points: which server hosts your website (the A or CNAME record) and where email for the domain should go (the MX records). Getting a new domain does not touch your existing site or mailbox. You add records on the new domain that point at what you already have, or set a redirect. The change takes minutes to make and usually a few hours to reach everyone, occasionally up to a day or two.

No. Your website lives on a hosting account; the domain is just the address that points to it. You can point the new domain at the same hosting and the same site, or redirect it to the old address until you're ready to switch over. Nothing has to be rebuilt.

Not by itself. Google has said for years that keywords in a domain are not a ranking factor worth chasing. Rankings come from your site's content, your reviews, and who links to you. What a strong domain changes is everything around the ranking: whether people click your listing once they see it, whether a referral lands on you, and whether a name someone half remembers turns into a visit. There is also an indirect effect. A name people remember and repeat gets mentioned, shared, and linked to more often, and those links and mentions are exactly what search engines do reward over time.

Think about the four ways a new customer arrives. They search for what you do, they search for your name, they ask an AI assistant, or they type an address they remember. On the first path the domain affects how your listing reads next to the others. On the other three it does most of the work: a name that matches your domain lands the search, survives the recommendation, and gets typed correctly. Our page on what a domain does for search visibility walks through each one.

Yes, in a specific way. Ask an assistant for a family dentist in your town and you get two or three names in a sentence, sometimes with a link and sometimes without. The person reading it has to act on the name. Businesses whose name and domain are the same thing are the easiest to act on, and the easiest for those systems to identify consistently across the web. A domain that differs from your name adds a step at every mention.

Search engines don't rank a .com above other endings. People do. When someone hears a business name and guesses the address, they add .com. When they see a results page, a .com reads as the established option and a .net or a hyphenated address reads as the runner-up. The .com is about how people behave, not how the algorithm behaves, and that behavior is where clicks and referrals come from.

Because ranking is only the first step. A hyphenated or .net address next to a competitor's clean .com costs you clicks on the same results page, and it costs you referrals every time someone guesses the .com and lands elsewhere. Your existing search presence moves with you when the migration is done properly, and you can keep your current site running on the new name from day one.

Keep the site the same and change only the address. Set permanent (301) redirects from every old page to its new equivalent, update the address on your Google Business Profile and in Search Console's change-of-address tool, and update your listings in the directories that matter to you. Rankings usually settle within a few weeks. Until you're ready to migrate, redirecting the new domain to your existing site changes nothing about your current rankings.