How do I move my website without losing rankings?

Build a complete old-URL to new-URL redirect map from a crawl of every page currently returning 200, deploy it as single-hop 301s before anything else changes, and keep it for at least a year. Everything else in a migration is recoverable; a missing map is not.

Only if you have genuinely equivalent pages for different languages or regions. One English site serving several English-speaking countries needs none — and declaring hreflang="en" and x-default both pointing at the same URL is inert.

How do I check who owns my domain?

Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain and read the registrant field. It should name your business. If it names your developer, an agency, or a privacy-proxy service you did not arrange, you do not control the single asset everything else depends on.

SEO

Should I buy a .com or a country domain?

Buy a generic domain — .com, .dev or .co — unless you are certain the business will only ever serve one country. A ccTLD such as .co.uk sends a strong local signal and permanently hard-codes your geo-targeting to that country.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 222 words 4 sections

The trade-off

A ccTLD helps in its own country and hinders everywhere else. A generic domain can be geo-targeted through content and Search Console settings, and can expand into new markets without a migration.

When a ccTLD is right

The business genuinely serves one country and always will
Local trust matters more than reach in that market
You already have one with established authority — keep it

The decision people regret

Buying a ccTLD at the start because it feels more established, then wanting clients across a border two years later. Migrating means rebuilding authority from scratch, which is a far larger cost than the domain saved.

Practical buying notes

Buy at a registrar that sells at cost rather than one with a low first year and a high renewal
Register it to your business, never to your developer or agency
Enable auto-renew and registrar lock on the day you buy it
Avoid hyphens and creative spellings — you will be reading this out on phone calls for years
Check the name is not already trademarked in the markets you sell into

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, hreflang, and the honest answer that most sites do not need it covers it in about 2 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.