Launching a site change straight to the live version with no test run takes a certain confidence. Roughly the confidence of cutting your own hair the night before a wedding.

A staging environment is just a private copy where you can break things safely first. Test the move there, and launch day comes with a lot fewer surprises.

A problem we run into: a company's main domain registered under one employee's personal account. Fine, right up until that person leaves on bad terms and takes the keys with them.

Keep it in a company-owned account, with the right people given their own access through it. Boring to set up, priceless the day you need it.

The global chess community could soon have a name of its own online, if a new application to ICANN is approved, and we're proud to be the Registry Service Provider behind it!

FIDE and World Chess have jointly applied for a new .chess domain. If approved, it would give the community, over 600 million people, one name that's recognisably theirs. As World Chess CEO Ilya Merenzon put it, chess has everything a major sport needs, except its own name on the internet.

it.com Domains is acting as the Registry Service Provider to make it possible.

Read the full announcement

Moving your site to a new domain is a bit like a house move. The stuff you forget to redirect is the stuff you'll be hunting for months later.

The part that's easy to skip: telling search engines where everything went. Without redirects mapping old pages to new ones, users and search engines keep landing on the old URLs, hit nothing, and gradually stop coming back, taking years of built-up traffic with them.

The redirects need to be ready and switched on by the time you launch.

Ever moved a site and watched the traffic dip before it climbed back?

A 301 redirect is a change-of-address card for the internet. It tells browsers and search engines "this page moved, here's where it lives now," and carries most of the old page's reputation across too.

Skip it, and old links hit a dead end. Small step, saves a lot of pain later.

New site, no traffic? It's rarely one problem.

Indexing, search demand, intent, promotion, a weak link anywhere holds the rest back. Learn how to diagnose each step in our new article

A working site isn't always a healthy site.

Expired SSL, DNS slips, pages falling out of the index, all easy to miss. 7 free tools to catch them early ↩️

August Industry Digest is out 🌐

Around 1,600 new gTLD applications, a study showing 58% of people lose sites they can't spell, and two Google search updates. Full digest ↩️

Our CEO Andrey Insarov shared a thought in Forbes on what top talent really wants: "Stop hiring stars and asking them to dim their light."

Full piece here ↩️

A mix-up worth clearing up: your domain and your hosting are two separate things. The domain is your address. The hosting is the actual house the site lives in.

They usually get bought together, so it's easy to assume they're one thing, until someone tries to move house and panics they'll lose the address too. You won't. You can pack up the whole site, move it to a new host, and keep the same name on the mailbox.

Did you know these were separate from the start, or did it click later?

🚀 From 150,000 to 200,000 domains since Q1 2026!

it.cоm has grown by 33% at remarkable speed, supported by a registrar network of 50+ partners across more than 150 countries. Its customers range from tech companies to creators and Italian businesses looking for a memorable online identity.

Read ↩️

In Marostica, northern Italy, they've played chess with people as the pieces for over 100 years!

Over 650 performers in 15th-century costumes fill a giant marble board in the town square, re-enacting a legend where a woman's hand in marriage came down to a single game. It runs every two years in a 3,600-seat amphitheatre built against a medieval castle, with the latest edition taking place in September.

High stakes for a knight to e5 ♟️

Would you make the trip for something like this?