RunCabin Blog · For working contractors

I'm changing my business name. What happens to my website?

September 9, 2026 · 8 min read

Short answer: you rename the site you already have, you keep the old web address alive and pointed at the new one, and you change the name on your paperwork and your website before you touch your Google profile. What you do not do is start a brand-new site at a brand-new address and walk away from the old one, which is the version that quietly costs you the most.

Name changes happen for ordinary reasons. You started as "Dave Ramirez Painting" out of your truck and formed an LLC with a real name on it. Your brother-in-law left the partnership and his name is still on the sign. You started doing drywall and cabinets, and "Premier Painting" now undersells half of what you do. Somebody with a trademark sent you a letter. However you got here, the website part is more mechanical than most owners expect, and the order of operations matters more than the design.

First, decide whether this is a rename or a new business

This is a legal question before it is a web question, and it changes everything downstream. If you are the same legal business with a new name - same LLC or same owner, same tax ID, filing a new DBA or amending your formation paperwork - then you keep your history. Your Google reviews, your search rankings, your license record and your customer list all belong to the same entity and simply get a new label.

If you actually dissolved one business and formed another, you are starting over in more ways than the sign on the truck, and your website is the least of it. New tax ID, likely a new license number, insurance re-issued, and a Google profile that may genuinely need to be a new one.

Get the paperwork straight first, in this order: the state filing or DBA, then your license board, then your insurance certificate. The name on your license and your certificate of insurance is the name that has to match everything else. Rebranding your website to a name your license does not carry yet creates a mismatch that a picky commercial customer will catch, and that the license number on your website is supposed to check out against.

The expensive mistake: abandoning the old domain

The instinct is to buy the new domain, put up the new site, and let the old registration lapse because you are not using it anymore. Do not do that.

Your old web address is printed on yard signs still standing in front yards, on invoices in filing cabinets, on truck lettering you have not paid to redo yet, on business cards in wallets, and inside every email you ever sent. It also holds whatever standing you built up in search over the years. Letting it expire means all of that traffic hits a dead page, and it means somebody else can register your old name and put anything they like on it.

What to do instead is boring and cheap: keep the old domain registered, and set a permanent redirect from it to the new one. A permanent redirect (a 301, if your host asks) tells browsers and search engines that the address moved for good, so people typing the old one land on the new site and search engines carry your old history over to the new address instead of treating it as a stranger. Renew it for years, not months. A domain renewal is one of the cheapest pieces of insurance you own, and the one owners most reliably regret cancelling.

If someone else controls your domain - a web company that registered it for you, or a marketing agency that "handles all that" - sort that out before you change anything else. Not controlling your own domain is the difference between a rebrand being an afternoon of edits and a rebrand being a hostage negotiation.

What Google actually cares about: consistency

Here is the part that decides whether your rebrand goes smoothly, and it comes straight from Google's own rules rather than from an SEO blog. Google's guidelines for representing your business say your Business Profile name must reflect your business's real-world name, "as used consistently on your shopfront, website, stationery and as known to customers."

Read that list again. Your website is one of the places Google names as proof of what your business is really called. That is why the sequence matters: change your paperwork and your website first, then edit the Google profile. Editing your Google name to something that appears nowhere else yet is asking Google to take your word for a name it cannot corroborate. Google may ask you to verify the business again after a change like this, and its guidelines say it can change or remove your information if the rules are not followed.

The same guidelines rule out the temptation that a rebrand tends to trigger. Your Business Profile name cannot include marketing taglines, keywords or service descriptions, or location names. So if the plan was to quietly upgrade from "Summit Plumbing" to "Summit Plumbing - Emergency Drain Cleaning Springfield" while you had the form open, that is not a rebrand, that is the kind of name Google is specifically watching for. Pick the name that is on your license, your invoices and your truck, and use exactly that everywhere.

One more practical note: change the name, then leave the profile alone for a bit. Rewriting your name, address, phone number and categories all in one session looks less like a business updating itself and more like someone taking over a listing. If the rebrand also comes with a move or a new service focus, space those changes out.

You do not lose your reviews (unless you do this)

This is the fear underneath the whole question, and the answer is reassuring. Your reviews are attached to your Google Business Profile, not to the words in its name field. Edit the name on the profile you already have and your reviews come with you, years of them, untouched.

You lose them two ways, both self-inflicted. One is deleting the old profile and creating a fresh one for the new name, which starts you at zero and hands the "no reviews yet" problem back to a business that solved it a decade ago. The other is creating a second profile for the new name and leaving the old one live, which gives you two listings competing with each other, splits your reviews across both, and creates a duplicate that Google will eventually deal with on its own terms. There is one profile. Edit it.

The same logic applies to the review link you hand customers. Once the name changes, re-copy your review link and update it wherever it lives - your review request text, your invoice footer, your email signature.

The change-everything checklist

The name lives in more places than anyone remembers. Work down this list and check them off, because the ones you miss are the ones that make a customer wonder whether you went out of business.

1. Paperwork first. State filing or DBA, license board, insurance certificate, bank account, tax records.
2. Your website, every mention. Not just the logo and the homepage headline: the page titles that show up in search results, the footer, the about page, the copyright line, the alt text on your logo image, and any place the old name is baked into a photo or a PDF estimate template.
3. Your email addresses. New domain means new addresses. Keep the old ones forwarding for at least a year so a customer replying to a two-year-old thread still reaches you.
4. Google Business Profile. After the website and paperwork are done, not before.
5. Your invoicing and scheduling software. The name on the invoice, the name on the automated reminder text, the name on the receipt.
6. Voicemail greeting. Thirty seconds, endlessly forgotten, and the first thing a new caller hears.
7. Social profiles and any paid-lead accounts you still run, so the name on the profile matches the name on the truck that shows up.
8. Directory listings where you are listed by name - your supply house's contractor referral page, your chamber of commerce, trade association listings.
9. Physical things, last. Truck lettering, yard signs, shirts, door hangers, business cards. These cost real money, so plan them as a batch rather than a panic, and get the digital side consistent while you save up for the wrap.

Say it out loud on the website for a season

For the first few months, put one plain line where people will see it: "Formerly Ramirez Painting. Same crew, same phone number, new name." Add the old phone number if that changed too.

It costs you a sentence and it answers the question a repeat customer is actually asking, which is not "why did you rebrand" but "is this still the guy who did my kitchen, or did somebody buy him out?" It also helps anyone who searches your old name and finds the new site, because the old name is right there confirming they are in the right place. Take it down after a season or two, once the new name has had time to stick.

What this costs, and where owners get stuck

If you own your site and your domain, a name change is a text edit and a redirect. An afternoon, mostly spent on the checklist above rather than on the website itself.

Where it stops being an afternoon is when somebody else makes your edits. On a managed plan where changes go through a support ticket, a rebrand is a queue, a back-and-forth about which pages you meant, and sometimes a charge for the work. And if the vendor holds the domain, the new one may end up in their name too, which just moves the problem forward a few years. Owners describe finding this out at exactly the wrong moment: in a complaint filed with the Better Business Bureau in September 2025, one customer wrote that they were told they "would have 100% access to the website I am having them build," then "It turns out I dont get the 100% access." That is one person's account rather than a statistic, but it is the failure mode worth checking for before you need something changed in a hurry.

The question to ask, today, before you need it: if I decided tomorrow that every page should say a different name, who would I have to ask, how long would it take, and what would it cost? If the honest answer involves a ticket and a wait, that is worth knowing now.

Where RunCabin sits

A RunCabin site is edited by asking for what you want in plain English, so a rebrand is one request: change every mention of the old name to the new one, swap the logo, update the email addresses. No ticket, no queue, no change fee. Your domain, professional email and an AI logo are all included in the flat $39.99/mo, so picking up a new domain does not come with a new setup bill, and the old one can keep pointing at the new site. There is no setup fee and no contract, and the site is yours - which is the part that matters on the day you decide the name on the truck needs to change.

---

Related reading: how do I choose a domain name for my business? · if I sell my business, do I lose my website? · if you cancel your website company, do you lose your website?