October 24th, 2008 by SwaraTech

A friend recently asked me how to move his blog, which is on /blog/ on his domain, to a new domain on it’s own. The steps are easy, but have to be taken in the right order to make sure you’re not annoying your users and the search engines:

1. Put up a robots.txt on the new domain with the following contents:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /

2. Copy the database and files to the new domain.
3. Edit wp-config.php to have the right database settings, and add the following lines, replacing sample.com with the right domain:

   define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://www.sample.com/');
   define('WP_HOME', 'http://www.sample.com/');

4. Now set up your blog install, with the same settings as on the old domain (if you have a caching plugin installed, delete your cache files).
5. Install the Search and Replace plugin, and do a search and replace for your old URL’s and change them with your new URL’s.
6. Once you’re done, and you’ve checked everything works twice:
7. Remove the robots.txt file.
8. On your old blog, add the following line to your apache .htaccess or vhost-config:

   Redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.newdomain.com/

9. Remove the old blog code and database.
10. Change your FeedBurner account, if you have one, to pick up the correct feed.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...