How To: Move WordPress to a new Domain!
For about roughly a year now I have been considering moving away from selfconclusion.co.uk to either 1) a new funky domain name, or 2) blog.stugreenham.com and yesterday in a wild move I took the plunge! Luckily things all went smoothly (he say’s) and so far I have not experienced any major issues so I thought the first post on my newly transfered blog will be about how I managed to acheive this so simply!
Beginning
To begin with and before I even touched my Self Conclusion (SC), I logged into my web hosting account and setup the new domain, created my new database and installed the latest copy of WordPress. Once this was done, I ran through the WP installation.
Next I logged into my current database that SC was using and backed the whole lot up exporting it to a .sql file. Although WP offers an Export/Import function I have had difficulty with it on previous occasions and there is also a limit on what file size you can import. Finally, take a full backup of your WP files which will include any custom themes, images, plugins, etc.
Uploading
Now take these backed up files and upload them to the new WP installation keeping the locations the same (for eg. If you have images in the root of your directory they will need to be in the root of your new directory). You don’t need to log into the WP admin area yet because once you transfer over the old database it will sort out all the users/posts/active plugins etc the whole lot just like you are used to from your existing domain. Once all the files are in place, log into your new database and drop all the tables in the database then import the sql from the old site that you have previously saved. This should import all your tables for you and populate them with all your settings.
Here is where the first tricky bit comes in. Whilst you are still in the database open the table wp_options and update the siteurl to the new URL (as shown in the picture below) of your website and save it.
Now login to your new URL WP admin area (http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/) using your old username and password that previously worked on the old site. Once you are logged in you should see all your posts, comments, plugins, etc.
Head to Settings page and make sure WordPress address (URL) and Blog address (URL) are both correct to the new URL. Once they have been changed should they need to then your blog should be up and running (nearly).
Configuring
Hopefully you have made it this far with me and no errors at which point we will need to check through each of the posts to make sure there arn’t any links pointing to the old URL. Thankfully there is a plugin which will do this all for you! The plugin Velvet Blues Update URLs is available for download here. Upload the plugin and activate it and follow the instructions. Its basically like a search and replace tool and very simple.
Whilst I am talking about plugins, it might be worth mentioning that if you are running Google Sitemap plugin that you will need to tell it to recreate your sitemap as it will still be using the old one with all the wrong URL links.
Redirecting using .htaccess
Now you have your new blog up and running as if it were the old one but with a new shiny URL you will need to make sure any users from the old site get redirected to the new URL. There are many ways in which this can be done but as I have alot of bookmarked links and posted my links in many places I needed to ensure that any link from selfconclusion.co.uk would redirect to my new URL and keep the same structure (for eg. http://selfconclusion.co.uk/test would go to http://designwoop.com/test).
After searching around I came across a great post from Nish Vamadevan over at fnode.com where he explains how to do this. On the root directory of your old domain, you will need to create a .htaccess file and put the following inside….
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END WordPress
This should hopefully do the trick! Make sure you change the domain names to your and give it a full test and make sure but for me it was spot on so thank you Nish for your great post!
Final Tidying Up
Were almost there now, just a few bits to sort out if you use feeds or analytics then this will also apply to you. Obviously both your analytics script and your feed links will be wrong as they will be pointing to your old URL. For me, I use Google Analytics and all I needed to do was log into my account and ammend the profile to the new address. With Feedburner, again I logged into my account and updated the address, I was too scared to change my feed URL incase I was to lose my subscribers so for now it is still called selfconclusion but I will look into this someday soon!
Right that should be it! I hope this has been helpful for you, if you have any problems then post a comments and I will do my best to assist you!
About the author...
Stu Greenham is a Web Designer / Developer who lives in Hull (North East England) and works for the web agency Strawberry. Follow him on Twitter (@stugreenham) to find out what he's up to.
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How are you hits looking now you’ve moved your complete site over?
So far so good mate picking up each day but still getting referrals from Selfconclusion.co.uk
Very good tutorial, Stu.
It’s a good thing you mentioned the .htaccess redirection option. I personally think it’s better than installing a plugin if because it prevents site loading slow-downs that may occur when using redirection plugins.
Yeah I agree and since moving my domain I have found that alot of my stats have moved over from my previous domain and any old links lingering around the web are guaranteed to come straight into Design Woop! Thanks for taking the time to comment! Glad I could help :)
Thanks.
You mean Google Anayltics stats? How long did it take for them to update for the new domain?
If you’re interested in this post, you might want to take a look at the ezMigrate plugin: http://techblog.triptic.nl/ezmigrate-plugin-for-wordpress/
Have you changed your Feedburner over to Design Woop yet?