Answer: Because changing it is an absolute pain in the bum! (That is if you are doing it yourself and are not an online genius.)

Seriously, this has been a complete headache over the past few weeks and a complete waste of my time. I thought I was over this pain. I remember fondly (not) when I first created my website with no prior experience, but no, I saved a whole bag full, when I decided to change my domain name to my author name.  

Why did I not do this before?

I have wasted a lot of time feeling that I wasn’t ready, feeling scared and those restrictions now mean that I am back to those two years prior, when I was setting up websites and building awareness of my brand.

Changing my domain name feels like going back to the beginning with a whole new website, only difference is that I have a lot more content, however, anyone finding it online is a challenge.

Why?

My new domain name has become my primary domain name. This means that probablewriter is now redundant. However, when you look me up online it still appears in the search results and my new domain name louisehigginsauthor does not. Why? Because the internet over the past year has cleverly associated my name with Probable Writer, just like I wanted it to. People have searched for me or my books, found my website in the results, clicked on the link and this has increased and strengthened the connection between all these sites. With a new domain name, this online work has to start again.

Another thing

 It is not easy to change your domain name and redirect. When I changed my settings on my Probable Writer website over to Louise Higgins Author, I lost my site. To find it again I had to log on as louisehigginsauthor admin instead of probablewriter admin. I then had to go to my host site to change the dominant domain from probablewriter to louisehigginsauthor. I only found this out through various help articles online and it took a lot of searching to find the right one. After all that, everything still did not look correct, so I had to contact my hosting company for help. Lastly, it takes 24 -48 hours for your new domain name to appear online. All that, after, I had announced my new branding and website!

But the biggest pain in the neck?

Loss of visibility and search viability. My domain name is new and has no traffic going to it, it will not show up on a basic search. Anyone who searches my name online, only finds probablewriter and of course when they click on this, the page is no longer available. The only way to find me right now is to enter my full author’s address: https://louisehigginsauthor.com and how many people will do that? I had forgotten this valuable lesson from my early days of Probable Writer. Another problem, every blog post link I have posted on Facebook with Probable Writer, does not work anymore, making the content useless.

I must be missing something: how to redirect my old domain name to the new, this is something I still need to figure out.

One last hassle:

The additional time consuming job of going back into all my books and changing all the links to my sites – Facebook, Email, Website, and Instagram

Please learn a lesson from me:

Choose your domain name wisely and keep it simple. Choose a name that will represent your work through the years, not just the first couple while you are finding your feet. The fact I had started a website, writing blogs, and released a book meant I was never going to be a probable writer. I was already a writer in every sense of the word.  If you are a writer use your pen name and then you will never have the same headache.

Please take my advice, I wish I had read an article like this when I was starting out.