In this article I am going to explain what is “Domain Forwarding”, how to set it up, and clear up any questions you may have about it. Here we go…
Let’s say you have a website with the domain, “greatdomain1.com.” Then one day, you find out “greatdomain2.com” is also available, so you go ahead and purchase it before anybody else grabs it.
Smart move.
You still don’t know exactly what you’d like to do with the new domain. Maybe use it for a future business. Or just want to keep it to make sure nobody else will build a site with that domain name.
Whatever you decide to eventually do with the new domain, one of the things you might want to consider in the meantime is to set up “domain forwarding” for it. And the good part is that it’s really easy.
What is Domain Forwarding?
Domain forwarding lets you redirect people going to a domain name to a different website of yours.

Parked Domain (Not Forwarded Yet)
For example I purchased the domain www.christinahills.tv and I was not sure what I wanted to do with that site yet. So instead of leaving it with a Domain Registrar Splash page like you see here on my other site www.christinahills.net, I am forwarding it to christinahills.com.
So what happens is, all people who type in christinahills.name in their Internet browser will actually land on my live site, christinahills.com.
Still don’t quite get it? Then watch the short video below…
Short Video on What is “Domain Forwarding” and How to Set it Up (7 min)
What About URL Redirects? Is That Same as Domain Forwarding?
I see many people use these two terms interchangeably, but they are not the same thing…
- Domain Forwarding is done within the domain registrar account, forwarding all URLs of specified domain. i.e. you do this at GoDaddy.com
- URL Redirects are done within the web host, i.e in your website. i.e. in your WordPress website, or in your hosting account such as Bluehost or Siteground
URL redirects is normally considered an advanced topic that I won’t cover In this article, I’ll just cover the Domain Forwarding.
Why Do You Want to Consider Domain Forwarding?
There are different scenarios where you want to have domain forwarding setup on your domain names:
- Increase traffic to your main live website, simply sending traffic coming to your unused domain.
- Catching people who spell out your URL wrong by redirecting the version of your domain with commonly misspelled URL (ex. michele vs. michelle) to the correct one.
- Send people from different versions of domain extensions to the main one (ex. yourdomain.net to yourdomain.com). For example, my domain christinahills.tv is also set to forward to christinahills.com. I may use christinahills.tv for something else in the future, but in the meantime, anybody who enters that domain or christinahills.name in their Internet browser are being forwarded to christinahills.com.
So go ahead and watch the short video above, and see how easy it is to setup Domain Forwarding!
Then… Let me know what you think of it!
Note that some web hosting companies do not redirect the pages inside the site as I showed in the video. I.E. christinahills.name/contact going to christinahills.com/contact. In general the domain forwarding works for the main domain name.
Thanks so much Christina, very helpful.
will doing this affect google in any way?. What I mean is google’s web crawler has rules regarding inside and outside links. will this hurt your main web page as far as google is concerned?
When you forward a domain, you are not doing any SEO on that domain name, because it’s not a hosted site. So this will not affect anything, as Google won’t really know or care about the domain forwarder
HI TO EVERYONE
Thanks so much Christina
FOR GIVING THIS CHANCE TO COMMENT ON YOUR ARTICLE
Santosh,
What is your comment about the article?
Brief, clear, and to the point, as always, Christina! Thanks.
Thanks Christina, easier than I thought! Helpful as always. Thank you.