by Kaitlyn Witman
From the server side, changing your CNAME to the new domain should do the trick. We advise our clients to keep the “www” configured to your main domain, but if you want to change your root domain so it doesn’t show the www, then this doesn’t make too much of a difference.
There is a potential issue of maintaining your SEO. You should plan to set up 301 redirects for every single page to its corresponding new page. This tells Google that there isn’t duplicate content, but rather to migrate all the good ranking to your new site. You should be able to do this in the DNS, although I’d trust a web developer to figure it out for you. Here is a good article from Heroku (a simple hosting service): https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains
Another issue that may be encountered is that your email may be temporarily unable to receive messages during the transition to a new DNS. To prepare, you should look into configuring MX Records if you haven’t already: https://support.google.com/a/answer/140034?hl=en
Then, make sure your Analytics and Adwords is using the correct URL, which is especially important in adwords: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6021546?rd=1#024