Moving Your Wordpress Site to a New Domain Name

So the move is over.  We moved from Monty's Mega Marketing to Blippitt almost a month ago now.  As much as I feared making the switch, it really wasn't that bad.

Actually, it was pretty easy to move from one domain name to the other.  You can even do it WITHOUT having to mess with importing SQL databases and whatnot, which is something I absolutely hate.

So are you thinking of moving your Wordpress installation to a new domain name?  Here is a step-by-step guide to exactly how this is done:

Existing Domain Name:

• Export Your WordPress Posts - The "Export" option is located under the "Tools" tab on the left-hand side of your screen, in your WordPress dashboard.  Save the exported file on your hard drive in a place where it will be easy to find.  We saved ours on our deskop.
• Download Your wp-content Folder - Use your FTP client to download your entire "wp-content" folder to your machine.  Later, you will upload it to your new domain.  Doing this will snag all of your existing plugins, themes, uploads, etc.
• Sub Domains - If (and only if) you have established any subdomains, you should grab these files from them as well.

New Domain Name:

• Install WordPress - I bet you knew that would be the first step.  We just used Fantastico since we use CPanel, and it's dirt simple.
• Upload Your wp-content Folder - Use your FTP client once again.  Over-write the existing wp-content file from your new WP installation.
• Import WordPress Posts - Once again, use the "Import" function in the "Tools" tab.  Navigate to that file you saved earlier.
• Activate Your Theme & Your Plugins - Reactivate everything and match it up to the way your old site was set up.
• Update Your Settings to Match the Old Site - Update all of your settings to match the way things were set up at your old site, including all of the plug-ins you just activated.
• Upload and Run the Update URL’s Plugin - The Update URL’s WordPress plugin is a great little tool.  This will basically hunt through your newly imported install and replace ALL instances of olddomain.com with newdomain.com.  It will go through all your posts and replace the domain portion of all your URL's with the new one.
• Repeat Steps for Sub Domains and Sub Directories - If you had subdomains established, just upload and setup your sub domains and sub directories using the same steps above.

Once you have finished moving everything over, double-check the following before your go sending out press releases:

• Feedburner Feed - Update this over at Feedburner.
• Your E-mail Address - Did you change your e-mail address?  Better let everyone know.  you should also set the OLD e-mail to auto-forward to the new one, AND set-up an auto-reply informing everyone else of the change.

Now you can set up your redirects so that the search engines know what the heck you just did.  I would NOT head over to your registrar for this.  I would recommend uploading an htaccess file so that your individual posts on the old domai name will forward to the individual posts on the new domain name.

Just open up a text file in Notepad and paste this text (replace the domain names where appropriate):

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old-domain-name.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new-domain-name.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END WordPress

D

Save this as a .htaccess file and upload it to your OLD site.

Doing so will cause all links to your old domain site to be redirected to the equivalent URL on the new site, assuming you use the same URL structure on the new site.   It will also let Google and the other search engines know you have moved.  Usually within a week, depending on the search engine, they will have gone through and updated their index with the new domain URL’s.

NOTE: You will take a hit when it comes to your search engine rankings.   This is because the links are pointed towards the old domain name, so when Google determines your rankings, they will see the new URL has zero backlinks.  This is why it is beneficial to get your friends to update their links to your site to the NEW domain name.

So there you have it - a quick and mostly-painless way to move your Wordpress site to a new domain name.  That wasn't so bad, was it?

(Note: this is a modified and updated version of this post from WPHacks.com)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Best of 2008: WordPress Tools and Tips (myventurepad.com)

It's nice to see you again! Thanks for reading Blippitt. What do you think of this story? Be sure to leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, File Transfer Protocol, FTP, Moving Wordpress, Wordpress

Related Stories on Blippitt:

• Wordpress 2.8.1 Released
• The Matt Cutts Guide to SEO