Recently one of our users asked for our help in changing their WordPress domain name to a new one. We thought it would be great if we shared this process on dieuhau so it would help those who are looking for the same way. In this article, we will show you how to properly domain change your WordPress site to a new domain name without losing your SEO rankings.
Before you start changing domain names
Before you begin, we want to highlight a few things. The process of changing to a new domain name will temporarily affect your search engine rankings like Google. Yes, this will also temporarily affect your search traffic. Keep in mind that this is normal, and it happens to all websites that move to a new domain name. Not only changing the domain name affects seo, but even changing the interface affects seo and search volume.
However, you can greatly reduce the negative impact on SEO if you follow this guide. We will show you the right way to change your WordPress domain name to a new one, properly set up 301 redirects, and notify search engines.
Please note that this guide is not intended for migrating your WordPress site to a new web host. This guide is for changing domain names. While the process is similar, there's more to it than setting up a 301 redirect.
Pre-Steps
In this tutorial, we'll assume that you've set up your WordPress site on oldsite.com, and you're trying to move it to newsite.com. We also assume that you have a web hosting account, and that you are familiar with your web hosting control panel
Step 1: Make a full backup before changing the domain name
Before you change your domain name or do anything else, it is very important that you make a full backup of your WordPress site. There are tons of plugins and solutions out there that allow you to create a backup. You can use VaultPress, BackupBuddy, BackWPup, or WordPress backup to Dropbox.
Step 2: Migrate your WordPress site
Once you have created a full backup of your old website, it's time to begin the domain change process. The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Duplicator plugin into the WordPress installation on your old site. Upon activation, this plugin will add the Duplicator menu item to your WordPress admin. Click on the Duplicator menu, and you will see a screen as shown below. Simply click the Create button to create a new package.
Clicking the create button will start the cloning process, and the plugin will ask you to give your package a name. By default, it will use the name of your site with a time prefix, but you can give it any name you want. The plugin will start creating a compressed package of your WordPress database and all your files. This may take a few tries depending on how much content you have. Once the process is complete you will be taken to the Duplicator packages screen. Download both the packages and the installation files on your computer. If you do not know how to install the plugin, please refer to our following article on how to create a wordpress plugin.
Next, you need to open your FTP program and connect to your new website. Make sure that the root directory, or the directory where you want to copy your site, is completely empty. Upload the installer.php file and your zipped package file to the new page. After uploading the files, just launch installer.php in a web browser. You can access it by going to http://www.newsite.com/installer.php.
The installer will ask you to provide database information for the new site and check the box to remove the table. Make sure that the database you are using is empty, and does not contain any data that you will need later.
Read the Warnings and Notices section and check the box that says: “I have read warning and notices“. Next click on the “Run Deployment“. The duplicator installer script will unzip the zip packages, install the database from your old site, and install WordPress with your themes and plugins. This process can take some time depending on the size of your website. Once the installation is done, the plugin will display the newly updated pages.
On the updated page you will need to update your URLs. Duplicator will try to guess your old and new URLs on its own, but you can also enter the URLs manually and click the Update button. The plugin will then replace all instances of the old site domain with the new site domain.
Once the whole process is complete, the Duplicator plugin will prompt you to go through the post installation steps. The first step is to save your WordPress permalinks. Login to the WordPress admin of your new site using the username and password you had on the old site. To enter Settings »Permalinks in the WordPress admin of your new site and click the Save button.
Then delete installer.php, installer-data.sql and installer-log.txt files from your root directory using FTP.
Finally, check your new site for broken links, lost images, articles and pages. Make sure everything is working and all functions are still there.
Now you have successfully changed the WordPress domain name to another domain name, but the process has not been completed yet. We still have to add proper 301 redirects and notify the search engines to keep your SEO ranking.
Step 3: Set up permanent 301 redirects
Setting up a permanent 301 redirect is crucial for both SEO and user experience. This allows you to redirect users and search engines to your new site. In other words, whenever someone enters one of your old posts or pages, they will be automatically redirected to your new site.
To set up a permanent 301 redirect, you need to connect to the old site using FTP and edit the .htaccess file. The file will be placed in the same directory as your wp-includes or wp-admin directory. Open the .htaccess file and paste the following code at the top:
#Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.COM/$1 [R=301,L]
Note: Replace newsite.com with your domain name in the above code.
Once you've applied these changes, go back to your old site. It will automatically redirect you to new websites. Otherwise, the redirect was not set up properly.
Step 4: Notify Google of the changes
Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools with your account to submit a change of address. Basically click on your site and look at the left menu under configuration. This allows you to notify Google of your new site and the transfer. That's right, you have to verify your new site, so go ahead and do it.
Step 5: Notify the user
While 301 redirects work best to always announce the move publicly. You can do this by simply writing a blog post on your new website. This can be useful in a lot of different ways. First, your users are more likely to remember the new domain name once they read about it. Second, you can ask your users to let you know if they see any errors. This can be very useful because you alone cannot test your website in all different types of browsers and system environments.
We hope that this guide was able to help you migrate WordPress to a new domain. If this guide was helpful to you please don't forget to share it. We appreciate all the retweets, likes, and +1s. Finally, let us know about your experience and/or questions by leaving a comment below. You can refer to the article 9 best WordPress plugins and tools for SEO.
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