How to Properly Move WordPress to a New Domain Without Losing SEO

Move WordPress to a new domain can affect your search engine ranking when not done carefully.

It is obvious that while moving your WordPress to a new domain, you will face certain changes in your SEO ranking. However, this effect can be minimized if you follow the correct steps with utmost perfection. By minimizing the impact you can get back your ranking and traffic within a short span of time.

However, if you move your WordPress to a new domain without taking precise steps, then you might just lose all your SEO ranking and traffic.

Follow the given sections to make sure that you follow the correct steps while moving your site.

Let me give you a short description of what you will be seeing in the following sections.

Here is the process which will include 5 steps that will help you to transfer your site from a domain to a new domain.

1. Creating a duplicator package for WordPress site
2. Creating a database for your new domain name
3. Unleashing WordPress on your new domain
4. Setting up redirects
5. Sending notification to Google about the new location

But before you start, you must take care of a few things.

While moving your site to a new domain you will temporarily face an effect on your ranking as well as the search topic. This is because Google as well as the other search engines will take time to adjust the changes caused by the migration of sites.

However, this effect can be minimized by following given steps.

Before we start with the steps there are some pre-steps which you must follow.

PRE-STEPS:

Before starting with the migration you must have a web hosting account along with the knowledge about the control panel of your web hosting account.

You must also be well versed in how to use FTP. You can use BlueHost or any such web hosting provider for creating an account if you already don’t have one.

Now we can start the process.

STEPS:

1. Creating a duplicator of your site

• Create a backup for your WordPress site. You can use several WordPress plugins available in the market for creating a backup Move WordPress. Here, we have used a backup that is well-fed with backup and migration functions.
• Here we are using the plugin called Duplicator
• Install and activate duplicator on your old domain name.
• Create a new package using the duplicator menu.
• The duplicator will run a list of tests to see if everything is in place, if everything says looks good then you can go ahead by clicking build.
• Once the package has been created you will be seeing two options, one would say install and the other archive.
• Click on the one-click-download button.
• Now both the files have been downloaded.

2. Creating a database for your new WordPress domain name

• Create a database using the control panel of your web hosting account. Scroll down the cpanel to select ‘MYSQL Databases icon’
• Once you have created a new database, provide a new user name and password for the new user and click on the create user button.
• You need to provide permission to the new user for getting access to the database.
• Add your user to the database and your database is ready for moving WordPress to a new domain.

3. Unleashing WordPress to a new domain

• This step includes uploading the files that you had downloaded in the first step.
• You need to upload the files directly into the root directory.
• Once you have finished uploading now you can unpack the WordPress site on a new domain.

4. Setting up redirect links

• This is very important as it will affect your SEO ranking and user experience.
• The permanent 301 redirect page will directly redirect your users to the new domain.
• For this, you need to connect your old site to FTP and eidt your .htaccess file.

5. Notifying Google about the changes

• Add your new domain name to the google search console.
• Make sure that you switch to the older version of the search console once you have added your new site.
• Now switch to the old domain name and click on the gear option.
• This will launch the change address tool.
• Now Google search console will ask you to fill the form for changing the address. Fill the form and submit it as the final step of getting a new domain name.

These were the steps which you need to follow for migrating your WordPress site to a new domain.