This article represents a little piece of Guardian history, because it is one of the first published pieces of content on our new global domain - www.theguardian.com - providing a single destination for the Guardian's content across all countries and devices.

We announced in May that we would be moving to a new global domain and explained how this move reflects our evolution from a national print newspaper based only in the UK – reaching hundreds of thousands of people once a day – to a leading global news and media brand with an ever-growing worldwide audience of tens of millions accessing Guardian journalism every minute of every day.

Events since this first announcement have only underscored our growing international role.

Our US team's explosive NSA revelations have dominated the US news agenda in the past couple of months, resulting in more traffic from the US than the UK to the Guardian website for the first time.

Our newly-formed Australian team are now producing a new Australia digital edition that has already resulted in a 10% uplift in Australia web traffic (and some great scoops along the way).

The result? A run of record overall global traffic for four months in a row.

Lots of work has taken place over the past few weeks and months to prepare for this moment, and today we are making the move to our new home. The site will look and feel exactly the same - only the URL will be different, saying www.theguardian.com instead.

We will be making the move gradually throughout the day (so don't be alarmed if at some point some URLs say .co.uk and others say .com).

The new domain means that our email addresses are changing to the format firstname.lastname@theguardian.com - you may want to add these new email addresses to your safe lists. All incoming emails will work if they are sent to our old addresses - so don't worry, we will still receive everything.

If you have links on your website which point to us, and would like to update them, that would be great. But if not, all old URLs and bookmarks should still work for the foreseeable future. (If you know of one that doesn't please let us know in the comments).

The team of hardworking folks at the Guardian will breathe a sigh of relief when this significant project is complete. But it's not the end of the story. Expect further improvements in the months ahead as we redevelop our site and our apps to showcase Guardian journalism in new and exciting ways.

Any questions? Feel free to leave a comment below or email userhelp@theguardian.com.