When I first started working on Maybank Bank Statement Converter, I didn’t think much about the domain and completely deployed the site on vercel. Vercel gives you free hosting on free tier and also handles domain for you. Well that includes free Vercel domain i.e. the .vercel.app. So my domain used to look like maybankconverter.vercel.app which doesn’t look great and feel like just a demo project.

I disregarded about assigning domain to the project and left the project on run without constantly checking it. Few months passes, I received an email from one of the user of the site asking for support to parse credit card statement. I was so excited about it and gladly reply to that person that I will support credit card parser soon. So I got a hunch to check my website on google analytics and my website has actual users. Even on google search console my website was constantly being queried everyday. I was so glad and happy about it and only then I made my mind to assign a domain to the projec to make it more serious.

So this what has happened, I assigned a subdomain to the project and now instead of it being maybankconverter.vercel.app it now looks maybankconverter.raziman.online. Despite assigning a subdomain instead of buying a whole domain it does look better without the vercel.app as part of the url. I left the project running to check again within few days more.

I stopped getting visitors, no new users coming to site anymore. My website is not even ranked on google search. I transfer my site properly using google transfer site tool and yet it doesn’t seem to acknowledge that my previous site is the same as the new site. I am dissapointed, I thought I have done the domain transfer correctly as suggested by google search console blog.

Conclusion, put up a good domain for your project immediately. Do not leave the project running and start getting traction only to realize you’ve been using default domain name by your hosting provider. Transferring domain does not immediately transfer the traction really well. You will lose all the traffic and new users you’ve been gaining lately. But I am sure given enough time your site your site can crawl back up on google search ranking.