Changing hosting of my website

[rampzoid]

i've been using a hosted online shopping cart for years but due to bandwidth charges i want to use another hosting company.
i cannot migrate the shop/cart to the new host so i intend to use a wordpress based shop with the domain name unchanged.

the shop is listed high in google with approx 22k hits/mth but due to market saturation of the product there are relatively few conversions.

can anyone please tell me if the retention of the old domain name will assist the re-listing of the new shop on google or advise further?

cheers

[buckworks]

Keeping the existing domain name would almost certainly be A Good Thing.

Track down all the URLs that are currently indexed in Google and do what it takes to redirect as many of them as you can to the equivalent new URL in the new version of the site.

Use 301 redirects, and try to do the redirect in a single step; avoid chaining of redirects.

[piatkow]

Leave both sites running in parallel for a week if possible as there may be a lag in some DNS records updating. This isn't as pronounced an issue as it was a few years ago but I still occasionally hear about delays for a day or so in updating.