Early Thoughts On The Domain Name Change
January 16th, 2008
It has been a couple days now since the transfer from Kyle’s Cove to our new name, Slickmania. I’ll be the first to admit that by the time that I finally made the change Sunday and finished the follow up work required after the change, I was absolutely exhausted.
There were a couple minor snags along the way, but nothing that wasn’t easily remedied once the problem was located. A couple readers have contacted me asking what all was involved, so I figured why not put it into a post?
Unlike a typical walk through post, I can’t provide a super detailed walk through because I worry about the possibility of someone else attempting it and running into problems, so I’ll instead just provide a brief outline of what I did to make the transfer. If there is an easier way (which there probably is), feel free to let me know in the comments!
Steps involved in switching to a new domain name:
- Setup the new domain, including installing WordPress and all the normal stuff you do when setting up a new website.
- Transfer over your blog theme, plugins you were using, your favicon, Robots.txt file, and whatever else that you want to use on your new domain.
- Export posts from the old domain and import to the new domain. This takes awhile if your export file is more than 8MB, though this may vary depending on your web host and the package you have with them. I had roughly 1000 posts/pages/categories plus comments to import and I think the file was over 100MB, so this took at least an hour to get everything moved.
- If you want to carry over your metrics statistics and other information, you’ll want to copy your MySQL databases for your WordPress plugins over. This is an optional step, but will make less work on the back end if you are able to successfully transfer them. You may also want to read this post on the WordPress Codex before attempting (thanks Ryan!).
- Make any theme changes that are needed to fit your new domain name such as new logo/favicon and ensure all of your plugins are activated and working correctly on the new website.
- Once everything is ready to go, setup a new feed for your new website (or if you use Feedburner, you can reuse the old one). A full explanation on how to do this will be posted tomorrow in a separate post.
- Issue a 301 redirect to the new website. This can be done via the .htaccess file in the root directory of the old website, but you’ll probably find it is even easier to just go to your domain registrar and use them to redirect the domain. As long as your new WordPress install uses the same permalink structure, the domain forward will send readers to the correct post on your new domain. This way all inbound links to the old site will route the person to the exact same post on the new URL by plugging in the same post slug. You’ll want to allow up to 24 hours before everyone is being properly forwarded.
- Announce the change to your readers!
Was the domain change worth it?
It has only been three days, but so far I have to say yes! Traffic is consistent or higher than before (including search engine traffic). So far things are going even better than I expected, but when you attempt something like this, there is always the potential for problems when you do something like this. For me, it was worth the risk to finally make the move to the new domain name, and I feel a lot better about my blog now, though the move was mostly for personal satisfaction.
A couple of downsides to switching to a new domain name:
- The new domain starts over with no Technorati authority and no Alexa score. Now, neither of these are relevant in todays world, but I know some people care about it so I figured I should at least mention it.
- If the domain is new, you may again be subject to the standard search engine penalties that every domain receives for the first 3-12 months. This can easily be remedied by using a domain you’ve had stored away for awhile or you can go purchase a domain from someone that has been registered for more than a year.
Any other questions regarding the change? Let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!
Cool themes! I'm going to test most of them on my wp blog. 
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Are you sure that search engine traffic is same just after the move? anyways all the best on the move!
@ Nirmal – Yeah, it is the same so far if not higher!
With a 301 redirect, everything from the old site now points here. Once everything here is finished getting indexed, then the search engines will point here, but the 301 redirect will need to stay so old links still get redirected to the appropriate posts.
Great information.
I moved my site from a subdomain of one domain to its own dedicated domain in May. When the new domain got indexed the traffic dropped off drastically even though I did the 301. However within a month I was back up to and exceeded my previous average traffic.
Everything is lookin good to me Kyle! One of the things I always hate is making big moves like this. Glad to see things are going great. (#):)
Well explained Kyle . I can use this in the future if i need to do the same .
Great job. I’ve never done such a large transfer, but I didn’t think about the ease of redirection. I figured you’d need to have a separate line for each URL, so your way is much quicker and easier.
I’d imagine 3 months from now both your Alexa and Technorati will be back to normal since I believe they are both based on 3 month statistics.
Honestly,
You could spend about a week or two weeks writing up this whole experience and selling it in eBook form for around $9.95 to $19.95 per copy.
I know for a FACT that I would buy a copy, I’d even pay a little more knowing it was coming from you.
If you sold 1000 copies… you’re looking at scoring between $1000 to $2000 dollars.
There are a lot of things that took place with this and I would bet the farm that there isn’t any professionally written documentation that covers this.
I am sure bits and pieces of the information are scattered about the Internet, as you probably had to do quite a bit of research, but heck, I’d pay money to get a copy of something that consolidates hours of research into a downloadable PDF eBook.
Garry’s right about the ebook buddy. I bet a lot of people would buy it without hesitation.
Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. I’m working on a WordPress eBook in my spare time (actually, I don’t have spare time, so I have to make time on weekends!). I will consider something like this once I’ve got that completed, but my concern is that there is a lot that can go wrong on the users end (even if instructed correctly) because of different web hosts, etc. I wouldn’t want someone mad at me if something went wrong.