Giving my portfolio its own address

A portfolio is more than a place to put your projects and experience. It is also one of the places where people find you on the internet.

For a while, mine lived at sayam-jain.vercel.app. It worked perfectly fine, but I always wanted it to have its own domain. I finally moved everything to sayamjain.com in October 2026.

The interesting part wasn't buying a domain and connecting it to Vercel. I also wanted Google to understand that the website had moved, so I wasn't starting my search presence from scratch.

Here's how I did it.

Why I wanted my own domain

The main reason was simple. I wanted to build an online presence under my own name.

When someone searches for Sayam Jain, I want them to find me, know a little about what I do, see my work and have a place to start. I didn't want my presence to be limited to profiles scattered across the internet.

Before this move, searching for my name brought up different people with the same name, a few profiles and some bits of my presence, including my Quora profile.

My portfolio was there too, but I didn't like how it appeared. Google showed the website name as "Vercel", with a globe icon.

That's understandable, because the website was sitting on a Vercel subdomain. But to someone looking at my work, a vercel.app address looks like a hosting default, not something that belongs to me.

Having sayamjain.com felt like a small but important step towards a proper presence on the web: a place under my own name, independent of the address my hosting platform gave me.

Buying the domain and pointing it at Vercel

On 25 October 2026, I bought sayamjain.com through Namecheap.

Honestly, I was surprised by how easy it was. Buying the domain, getting into the DNS settings and pointing it at an existing website wasn't nearly as complicated as I had imagined.

My portfolio was already hosted on Vercel, so I didn't need to move the website anywhere. I just had to set two DNS records at Namecheap:

A record       @       → Vercel
CNAME record   www     → Vercel

The A record handles the bare domain, and the CNAME points the www version at Vercel.

I also set up Namecheap's free email forwarding, so mail sent to contact@sayamjain.com lands straight in my Gmail inbox. A domain for my portfolio and an email address on the same domain, without paying for a separate email service.

One address, not three

This was one part I didn't want to leave ambiguous. There were now three ways to reach the portfolio:

• sayamjain.com
• www.sayamjain.com
• sayam-jain.vercel.app

I wanted one of them to be the official version, so I chose www.sayamjain.com as the canonical address.

Vercel handles the redirects. The bare domain sends visitors to the www version with a 308 permanent redirect, and the old Vercel address does the same:

sayamjain.com          → www.sayamjain.com
sayam-jain.vercel.app  → www.sayamjain.com

Every page also has its own canonical tag pointing to the same page on the www domain. Whichever address someone visits, they end up on the one official website, and search engines see one preferred version instead of three copies.

A 308 is a permanent redirect, just like a 301; Google's site move guide recommends either.

Telling Google about the move

This was probably the most important part of the migration. Getting the domain working in a browser is one thing; making sure Google knows about the move is another.

In Google Search Console, I verified a new Domain property for sayamjain.com by adding a DNS TXT record at Namecheap. Once it was verified, I submitted my sitemap the same day and started the Change of Address from the old vercel.app property to the new domain.

One detail is worth paying attention to here. I kept the old HTML verification tag in the site's code, even though the new domain was already verified. Google's Change of Address needs you to own both the old and the new property in Search Console, so removing the old verification would break the move.

There are two timeframes here. Search Console runs the move for 180 days and asks you to keep the redirects for at least that long, longer if Google still sends visitors to the old address. Google's broader site move guide goes further: keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year. So I'm not treating day 180 as a deadline. The redirects and both verifications stay.

Getting my name to show instead of Vercel

I actually started on this before I bought the domain.

On 20 October 2026, I added WebSite structured data, written as JSON-LD, to my portfolio. It tells search engines the name of my website, so the result can show my name instead of "Vercel".

I don't think structured data is a magic switch that guarantees how a search result will look. But it gives search engines the information I want them to have about the site.

It was separate from the domain move, but both changes served the same goal: making my portfolio easy to recognise when someone searches for me.

What I'd tell someone doing this

Honestly, don't overthink buying a domain. I had wanted to do this for a while, and once I actually sat down to do it, the purchase and the first setup were quite straightforward.

But don't stop at connecting the domain to your hosting provider. These are the things I'd make sure to handle:

1. Decide which version of your domain is the official one.
2. Redirect the bare domain and the old hosting address to it.
3. Make sure every page points to its own canonical URL.
4. Verify the new domain in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.
5. Use the Change of Address tool when moving from the old address.
6. Keep the old verification while the move runs, and keep the redirects for at least a year.

The step I'd be least willing to skip is telling Google about the move. DNS makes the website reachable, but I also wanted Google to know where it had gone.

One thing I've realised: owning a domain isn't just about a cleaner URL on your resume or LinkedIn profile. It's about having a place on the internet you can call your own.

For me, that's www.sayamjain.com. And hopefully, when someone searches for Sayam Jain, they find one more useful place to learn who I am and what I work on.