Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we’re going to be talking about how to change your website’s domain name. And I’m really excited about this because it’s a little bit of a tedious process, but of course, we’ll get to that in just a few minutes.

First off, I want to let you know about the announcements. There is a WordPress webinar tomorrow Thursday, June 4th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, and it is how to customize your WordPress dashboard. If you’re interested in signing up, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. You can register, and even if you can’t attend live, then you’ll get an email with the replay.

And if you’re listening to this in the future, you can always head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar-replays, and it’ll give you all of the webinar replays right there. We’re going to walk through how to customize your dashboard to make it easy for you and easy for your customers, your clients, people who you teach how to use WordPress. Make it so that they don’t have to stumble around the WordPress dashboard and try to figure out all the things underneath the hood.

We’re going to talk about all of the things that you can do to make that experience so much easier for your customers, and hopefully, you don’t get nearly as many support questions on how do I do this and how do I do that inside of your website. So this is being recorded on, let’s see, June 2, and there’s not a lot going on in the WordPress space. There is the WordPress 4.3, the newest version that’s coming out. That is scheduled to be in beta shortly. I believe that’s another month out or so, so there’s not a lot happening in the news. No real updates to Jetpack or anything along those lines, so today what I just wanted to share is make sure that you spend some time this week logging into your WordPress sites.

And make sure your plugins and your themes are updated. I know that these things get outdated very, very quickly. I’m surprised that logging in regularly seeing how many updates happen to these plugins that I use on a regular basis. So make sure that you’re using that, and also, make sure that your site is being backed up. You want to make sure that its backing up the correct things.

I know that a friend of mine contacted me the other day and was like, “Why is my website’s backup now 2 gigabytes instead of the 200 megabytes?” And there was a small little error that he had checked the wrong box inside of the back WP up plugin. And with that we got it resolved, and now, he’s back to backing up only that site instead of the entire server.

So you just want to make sure that your backups are being backed up properly, and that you know that you can go in there and you can see that yes, we have recent backup from this week or last week or this month or whenever, however often you back up all our core files within WordPress. So that’s the news. That’s the tip of the week to go ahead and do that.

This week the plugin of the week is called Appointment Booking Calendar, and there’s a link to it in the show notes for Episode #235. But basically, this is a plugin that will allow you to accept online bookings from a set of available timeslots in a calendar. You can link your booking form then to PayPal, and so you can take up a PayPal payment in the process.

Something that would be good for this is maybe like a nail salon or maybe a massage place that people want to schedule for an appointment and then they want to pay via PayPal. Even like getting your hair cut or something along those lines, like all those service type businesses could be beneficial to them.

You could even do it for medical consultations, even classroom events, transportation, other activities where you have a specific time and you have a specific number of people that can only sign up for that at a time. So maybe like a tour. Maybe if you’re doing a city tour, you can have 12 people sign up, and then they can pay ahead of time. That would be perfect for that as well. And so that is the plugin of the week. It’s called Appointment Booking Calendar.

Okay, this week actually, the topic was inspired by somebody who wrote me an e-mail and said that they were thinking about changing their domain name from one domain to another domain. And she thought that I did a podcast about this in the past, but in reality I haven’t. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the steps and the process to go from one domain name to another.

And so I wanted to go ahead and just dive right in and talk about that today. And there are – let’s see, one, two, three, four – seven steps to go through to update your domain. It is of little bit tedious, and some of it is just a bit tactical. But I believe that it can all be tackled even if you don’t have a lot of WordPress experience or even domain name experience or anything along those lines.

And of course, like your hosting company they’ll be able to help out with some of these tasks as well. So let’s go ahead and dive right in. The first step is rather obvious, and we want to make sure that we have that new domain name already. We can’t change to another domain name without purchasing that domain, so the very first step is to go out there and purchase another domain name.

Depending on what you’re doing or where you want to register this domain, I recommend my personal service that I like using for domains is called Hover. You can find out more at yourwebsiteengineer.com/hover. And what I like to do is I like to register all my domains in one place, so they’re all located in one place. So I would go over to hover.com, and I would sign in.

I would purchase that brand new domain name. Maybe I wanted to rebrand yourwebsiteengineer.com to thebestwordpresspodcastshow.com or whatever, whatever that new name is. I’m gonna go in, and I’m going to purchase that new domain name. And once I’ve got it all purchased and setup, then it’s obviously going to take a day or two before that domain name is registered.

Actually it takes a few hours to get everything setup, and then the next step, step two is going to be point that domain to the hosting company. So you’ll need to update your name servers or A record to point to your WordPress host. It depends on what the host is of course, and for this entire podcast, we’re going to assume that the new WordPress hosting company is something like a HostGator, a Bluehost, DreamHost, something that has a cPanel interface to go in and update and setup your hosting account.

So you want to take in that consideration. If you’re using something like Flywheel, the steps would be just a little bit different, but in general the steps are going to be fairly much the same. So once we point our domain to our hosting company, what we would do – we’ll say Bluehost just for this example – we could point our domain to Bluehost. And then we would go into our domain name, and then we would set the servers to ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com.

And then that’s going to take the domain name, so when somebody types in that new domain name, it’s going to take them to the Bluehost page. And it’s basically going to be a Bluehost landing pages for the time because we haven’t done any of the other steps. So that’s the best first step to do is point that domain to the hosting company. Once that’s there and once you update the name servers, it can take up to 48 hours before you start seeing this change live.

A good way to check that is you can actually go in, and you can clear your computer cache and clear your web browser cache. Sometimes when I’m doing this, I like to open different browsers or different computers just because all that information’s not stored in the cache. So for example maybe I check out my domain. I go into Google Chrome, and from there I try my new domain name.

And I see that it’s not pointing to the Bluehost account yet, so then maybe I’ll open Safari a few hours later. And then I’ll try it in Safari because Safari hasn’t cached that domain name yet because I’ve never opened it in Safari. And then if it doesn’t work then, maybe I’ll try another computer. Sometimes it’s good to try from a different phone. I try all of these different things if it doesn’t work.

So once you have that domain pointed to your hosting company and you get that landing page, now what you can do is you can add your domain as a new add-on domain. And in the cPanel interface, it’s in there somewhere. You just kinda have to look for it. Sometimes the cPanels have search areas, and you just search for add-on domain or add an additional domain. The terminologies are going to be different with whichever hosting company that you may be using.
So basically, what you want to do is you want to tell that hosting company – we’re gonna tell Bluehost – that our new domain name that we want associated with our shared hosting account is this new URL. So we’ll go ahead and do that, and then what happens is it generates a new folder inside of your subdomain or inside your WordPress hosting.

So if you’ve ever actually looked in via FTP – and FTP stands for file transfer protocol, and it’s a file browser for your server. And I use this all the time when I’m wanting to modify and change files and what not. I do it via a program called transmit on my computer. There is a file manager inside the cPanel interface that you can go in. You can look, and you can see okay, here’s all of the information, all of the files that are stored on my server.

And so if you’ve only installed one website on your webhost, then you will see this new folder in there. And it’ll have your new website domain.com as the name of the folder. All right, the next step is where things get a little bit tricky and a little bit confusing. So there’s two routes that you can go here, and we’re gonna split up. One route is going to be the manual way to do this, and then the other route is going to use a plugin and then uninstall from a plugin.

So we’re gonna explore both of these routes right here. And it is going to be a little bit confusing right here, but I promise you we will cover both. And we will tackle both ways to do this. So the first way is to get your WordPress files into your new folder that we’ve just created. So the easiest way to do that, the way that I like to do it, is basically just install a blank installation of WordPress in your new folder.

And you can do this with the WordPress one click install scripts that are built into your hosting panel, and I do this because of the fact that it’s going to generate a database for you. And it’s gonna put all the WordPress core files exactly where they need to be. And so what I like to do is I just go ahead and create that, and you can create any username and password. You’re gonna overwrite all of this stuff in just a minute anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

So you’ve got that brand new install of WordPress. You’ve got it setup. It’s there. It’s working, and now what you want to do is take everything that’s in your wp-content folder from your old site. And you want to duplicate that over into your new site, and so that’s a basic duplication. You can do that via FTP. You can do that via the file manager of your WordPress hosting company, either way. You basically want to get all of your plugins, your themes, your uploads, you want to get all of that information from your old site to your new site. And you can duplicate it or you can move it, either way. I am normally more comfortable with duplicating it and then deleting it later once we’ve got the new domain up and running.

And then what you want to do is then we’ll have to go into phpmyadmin, and then you will have to export the old database. And then you will have to import the new database, and so you want to do that. That’s the next step that you can do to duplicate that. And then from there while you’re in phpmyadmin once we’ve updated that and we’ve imported into the new website, the new URL, then you have to go in. And you have to change the URL from your old URL to your new URL.

So now you’ve got mirrored database tables, so you’ve got two different databases, which is good. And then we’ve got two different sites, which is good as well. And then when you’re in your new site, then you should be able to login. You should be able to see that when you’re looking at your new domain name. And then what you’ll want to do is you’ll want to install the search and replace plugin.

And from there what you want to do once you have that search and replace plugin, you can search for your old URL. And it replaces it with your new URL. So this will update any linking that you’ve done between both your blogs and any other links that are associated with images, and all those different things will be updated inside your WordPress site.

And then the last step once you have that all set up, then you’ll want to go to your settings and then to permalinks. And you want to just go ahead and save those permalinks, and that will rewrite what’s called an HT access file. And that will make sure that all of your pages are working properly. So that’s the manual way to do it. That’s if you really want to go through step by step by step. Okay, this is the process to do it.

The other way that you can do it is you can actually install the duplicator plugin, which is one in the word processor repository. And you can install that, and then you can duplicate your website. And it’s going to basically zip everything up into a zip file. You can download that from your old WordPress installation. And then what you’re doing is you’ll take that. You’ll upload that zip file into your WordPress installation, your new site, into that new folder. And then you can start the process of unzipping that, and that will go through all of the processes to get that all setup. Now, obviously, you can take the four steps we talked about to manually do it, or you can do it in this much quicker fashion.

Basically, what we’re doing is we’re just duplicating our sites. We’re not just changing the URL. We’re gonna duplicate it, so then both sites will work simultaneously. And then we can just turn off the old site, and we’ll just delete the old site. So I like doing it this way just on the fact that you’ve got complete control. Your site’s not gonna get out of sync when you’re doing this.

It’s probably an hour long process to go through and make this switch, and then you turn off the old domain. Or actually, what I like to do too then once it’s all set up is you can take that old domain and just forward it to your new domain. So when people go to the old domain name, then they are forwarded over to the new one. And so that’s the way that I like to do it.

So first, let’s recap these steps real quick. I know that it was kind of a complicated process that we talked through. But first, we want to purchase the domain name. Then we want to take that domain name, and we want to point it to our new hosting company. Then once we’ve got it pointing to our hosting company, we go inside the hosting company’s cPanel, and we say oh, we want this new URL as our domain name.

And then once we’ve got that as an add-on domain, we’ve got that connected, then we duplicate all of our old files from our old WordPress site to our new WordPress site. And remember we’re duplicating our sites essentially is what we’re doing. And then once we’ve got that all taken care of or if we want to use the duplicator plugin, we’ve unzipped that. We’ve undone everything.

It unzips. It works through the installation, installs WordPress. It does everything that you need it to. And then from there then the last step is to update your permalinks to make sure that the URL structure is working properly. That updates the dot ht access file. And then the last step, of course, is to go in, and then we change our URL, that old URL that we’re not using anymore.

Then what we do is we forward that to the new URL to make sure that people if they still go to your old domain name, they’re going to forward over to the new domain name. And then once that domain registration expires for the old domain, you have the option of renewing it and continuing that forward, or you can say oh, it’s been six months. People are now knowing my new domain name, my new URL.

Then they can just use that, and you can let the other one expire. So those are the complicated steps to do that. I highly recommend using duplicator. You can even use something like BackupBuddy, and you’re using BackupBuddy to move a site from one backup place to another. You can do that in both of those steps when you are unzipping and uncompressing and extracting your website. They give you the option of saying okay, you find and replace different things.

So you put in your old URL, and then this is your new URL. And then it automatically finds those throughout your site. So those are the steps. There’s eight steps to go ahead and update that domain name from one place to another. Again, you have to think through all the branding different things of do we really need to change our domain name and all the logos and all that different stuff that needs updated.

So that’s just like the physical how to move one site from one place. You duplicate it, and you call it something else. And then you have to go back through, and then you have to start rebranding and then changing things. And if you change color schemes, all those different things, all of those things need to take into consideration when changing your domain name and rebranding and things along those lines. That’s going to wrap up this episode.

And I’m excited for the next couple weeks because I have a great interview lined up for you for next week. And then the week after, we’re going to talk about why I moved from MailPoet to MailChimp. And I know in that episode I will mix those two words up so many times because they are very, very similar. But we’ll be talking about that on the next or in two episodes from now. So until then take care, and enjoy using WordPress. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.