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How To Move Your Website To A New Domain in 5 Steps?

Planning on moving your site to a new domain?

Learning how to move a website to a new domain name is pretty straightforward. You can count on the complete process taking anywhere from 48 to 72 hours (or maybe much longer if you have a very large site) but if you have a smaller site then probabilities are you can get the whole thing set up properly and read to go on the new domain name in just a few hours.

Your objective is to make the transition hidden and seamless to the user, and to ensure that Google identifies that your new pages get the same quality signals as the pages on your own site. When you are moving your site, pesky 404 (File Not Found) errors can spoil the user experience and negatively impact your site’s efficiency in Google search results.

How do you move a website to a new domain name without hurting your site’s performance in Google’s search results? Read on for few tips on moving your site to a new domain (for example, changing from www.example.com to www.example.org).

Step 1:

Transferring files

The initial step in moving your website to your new domain name is to make an account on your server or shared hosting plan for the new domain and then move over all of the old website files to the new account you have created for the new domain. Ensure to copy the files over and do not delete the files in any case from the old account for the old domain name yet.

Step 2:

Change Nameservers

Make sure and change the nameservers of the new domain name to point to the recently created account that you have created on your server or shared hosting plan. Remember that it will usually take between 48 and 72 hours for the DNS to spread throughout the web.

Step 3:

Change Files

The following step is to change all instances of the old domain to the new domain within the files that you have moved over to the new account on your server. You will almost certainly be able to achieve this very quickly if you just use the find and replace feature in your FTP client (i.e FileZilla, Dreamqweaver, etc.). Making all of your links absolute links rather than relative links is generally the best way to go for SEO purposes so if this is something that you had ever thought about changing over then now would be a good time to undergo and audit all of your website files to change relative links to absolute when suitable.

Step 4:

Create 301 Redirects

Setting up 301 redirects in your .htaccess (assuming you have a Linux server) under your previous account is very significant. A 301 redirect will work to automatically and permanently redirect visitors and search engine bots who visit www.olddomain.com/my-page to www.newdomain.com/my-page. This is vital from an SEO viewpoint as 301 redirects have the potential to pass through the “link juice” of any backlinks pointing to the old domain to the new domain together with any associated search engine rankings. This is also crucial from a user point of view as anyone who tries to visit any page on your old domain will be automatically sent to the correct page on your new domain.

Read this guide on how to set up 301 redirects to get all of the nitty gritty 301 redirect setup details.

Step 5:

Test

Ensure that your nameservers have been set up on your new domain and that the DNS has finished propagating. Once you make sure that the DNS is resolving correctly for the new domain then it is time to test all of the old pages that you are redirecting from the old domain to the new domain and then also test by looking through every page of the new site and ensure that there are no faults. If all of the pages of your old site have been indexed by Google then a quick way to test that the 301 redirects have all been set up and working properly is to just do an advanced Google search query that will return all of the pages from your old site indexed by Google. You can do this just by typing “site:olddomain.com” into Google (without the “”). Now all you have to do is click on each page and if you have set up the 301 redirects correctly then each time you click on the page link your server should automatically and instantly redirect you to the suitable new page on your new domain.

To avoid confusion, it's best to ensure you maintain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

We all know that moving is never easy – but these steps must help ensure that none of your good web reputation falls off in the process.

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