Moving A Wordpress Blog on Dreamhost From One Domain Name To Another
Welcome to JamesSpratt.org, you're encouraged to subscribe via my blog's RSS feed. I use Google Reader to read other sites via RSS, or you can get new blog posts auto sent to your inbox by entering your email address here. Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to comment or send feedback.
In the end this was so much easier than I’d an…ticipated. There’s quite a few posts out there informing you how to go about moving blogs, but this one is specific to domains on the same host.
- Backup everything from your old domain locally.
- Consider putting a warning notice on your old site to inform visitors of the imminent move.
- Purchase the domain name. The hosting should simply reside side by side on your current web server.
- Use this opportunity to delete any old plugins you no longer require. Streamline your blog as much as possible.
- Consider inserting an auto-redirect line in between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your old site’s header:
- Copy (don’t move) everything from olddomain.com to newdomain.com
- Using their excellent one-click install, install Wordpress on the new domain.
- Link the new domain to the old SQL db.
- Once I thought everything was in place I started deleting the backups. I then noticed that all of my uploads had disappeared in amongst it. A very handy feature that Dreamhost supply without you even requesting is the .snapshot. Dreamhost takes regular ’snapshots’ or backups of your file structure which you can then restore from. Go to the root of you host and cd to a hidden folder named .snapshot. Bingo.
- SearchandReplace.zip plug it in, activate it, run it. I’m no coder and don’t know my SQL. This plugin runs a SQL statement to search and replace every instance of a known phrase. For me I just searched for jamesspratt.com and replaced this with jamesspratt.org. Get it right though as there’s no room in this plugin for human error. Then deactivate and delete it to keep your installation as light as poss.
- Change any site reference codes if you’re using certain stats providers, e.g. Google Analytics or Clicky.
- FeedBurner: Replace your old rss feed with the new, this way there will be no loss of continuity for subscribers.
- Sitemaps: This move will obviously have screwed up any search engine page rankings, and links elsewhere on tinterweb that point to specific posts. It will take a while to regain your traffic levels, creating a fresh xml sitemap will help bring you back up.
- Give the site a sanity check, have a click around to ensure there are no glaring errors. Or better still, get someone else to do this.
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="5; url=http://newdomainname.com">
UK IT bloke, documenting my family, friends, photos but never enough skydiving or travelling. If then 
13 lonely subscribers. Free blog updates:
Holy crap, I thought I was a geek.
I do however prostrate myself at the feet of a bonce so big it casts shadows over mountains.
Think I’ll stick to simple blogger.