How to shift your wordpress blog to a new domain

[aemathenge]

• Back up all your blog files and database. The backup buddy premium plugin does this wonderfully. At the old domain’s dashboard, access Tools on the left sidebar, click Export, select All content. Menus, custom fields, comments, pages and posts will all be exported. Next, save the downloaded .xml export file on your computer.
• Through cPanel, at your old domain’s File Manager, get a copy of “wp-content”, compress the folder and save it on your computer. It contains your plugins, themes and uploads.
• Next install into your new domain your WordPress, login into your WordPress dashboard using [URLnf=http://www.newdomain.com/wp-login]http://www.newdomain.com/wp-login[/URLnf], where “newdomain” is your new domain name. At the dashboard, select settings, then general. Proceed to setup the WordPress address and new site to be the same, with or without www. At Permalinks settings, set the permalinks PRECISELY the way it was in the old domain. This is a crucial step that re-directs traffic from the old domain to the new one.
• At the new domain, using cPanel, upload the compressed wp-content to the new domain. This over-writes the new folder with the old folder material. Time taken to complete this will depend on the amount of themes, plugins, images and posts. At the dashboard, tools, import, select “WordPress”, on being asked to install “the WordPress Importer”, chose “install now” then click “activate & run importer. On the screen, select the .xml file from the old domain you exported and upload it. This brings posts, pages and comments from the old blog. Activate the plugins and theme from the old domain. Using Update URLs WordPress Plugin, update all links automatically.
• Next, go to the .htaccess file of the old domain, add the following on top of the file:

#Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http: // www. newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This tells search engines that your domain has moved. It brings the old site’s SEO benefits to the new site. Next go to your Google Webmaster account dashboard, chose old domain, expand site configuration, click “change of address”, on item 4, give your new domain. Google will now crawl your new site and index pages.​

That is it.

 

[ElixantTechnology]

This will work... Sometimes. There are a lot easier ways of going about this. First off being, what you do is add your new domain as a parked domain in cPanel, what is going to happen now is you will be able to access the wordpress installation from both domains, without having to make any changes.

You want to login to wordpress from the old domain, to the admin panel and change the Wordpress URL from within the Admin Panel. If you do not do this, and you just move the wordpress over to the new account, it will not work, there will be errors everywhere and it will keep trying to direct you to the old URL which if you used the process above, is no longer active. If this happens, you would have to run a SQL command to change the URL in every single page and post and blah blah blah that wordpress has created and it can be a big pain in the butt.

If you have created internal site links in any of your posts/pages, be sure to edit them and change the URLs otherwise you're going to have broken links all over the place.