Moving a WordPress Site to a New Domain Without Breaking It

You found a better name. Maybe your old one was hard to spell, or it had a dash in it, or customers kept typing it wrong. Now the last thing standing between you and the new name is a worry: if I move my WordPress site, will I break it?

Fair question. But moving a WordPress site is mostly a checklist, not a gamble. Do the steps in order and your site keeps working, your images still show up, and Google follows you to the new name. Here's how to move a WordPress site to a new domain without the parts that scare people.

Before you touch anything: back up

A backup is your undo button. If something goes sideways, you put the site back the way it was and try again. Nobody loses a weekend.

Most WordPress hosts have a one-click backup in their control panel. If yours doesn't, a free plugin like UpdraftPlus will save a full copy of your site — files and database both. Run it and make sure the backup finished before you do anything else.

What "files and database" means for you

You don't need to understand the guts. Just know a WordPress site is two things: the files (your theme, your photos, your plugins) and the database (your pages, posts, and settings — including the web address, written into the database in a few hundred places). That second part is the one that trips people up, so we'll handle it carefully.

Step 1: Get the new domain connected

Your new domain has to point at the same place your site lives before anything else can work. That's a separate job, and we wrote it up on its own so you can follow along.

How to Point Your New Domain to Your Current Website walks through it. Do that first, then come back here.

Step 2: Change the address inside WordPress

WordPress stores your web address in its settings. You have to tell it the new one.

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Settings > General.
3. You'll see two boxes: WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL). Change both to your new domain.
4. Save.

Heads up: the moment you save, you may get logged out, because the address just changed under your feet. That's normal. Log back in using the new domain.

Step 3: Fix the old address that's hiding in your content

Here's the part that bites people. Your old domain is written into your pages in ways the settings screen doesn't touch — inside image links, inside buttons, inside links from one page to another. If you skip this, images break and internal links send people to the old name.

The clean fix is a free plugin called Better Search Replace. It finds every mention of your old domain in the database and swaps in the new one, all at once.

• Install and activate it.
• In the "Search for" box, put your old domain exactly as it appears (for example, oldname.com).
• In the "Replace with" box, put the new one.
• Run it as a dry run first — it tells you how many changes it would make without touching anything.
• If the number looks reasonable, run it for real.

We cover the link side of this in more detail in Fix the Links Inside Your Site After You Switch Domains, including how to catch links the plugin misses.

Step 4: Send the old address to the new one

People have your old link saved. Google has it indexed. You don't want either one hitting a dead page. A 301 redirect quietly forwards every old address to the matching new one, and it tells Google to move your ranking over too.

This is the single most important step for keeping the customers and search traffic you already earned. We laid it out plainly in How to Set Up 301 Redirects From Your Old Domain to Your New One.

Step 5: Make sure the lock stays on

That little padlock in the browser bar is your SSL certificate. It was set up for the old name. The new name needs its own, or visitors get a scary "not secure" warning right when they land.

Most hosts add this free and automatically, but you should check. Here's how: Keep HTTPS Working: SSL Certificates After a Domain Change.

Step 6: Tell Google, then check your work

Add the new domain to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. Google finds the move on its own eventually, but this nudges it along. Google explains the whole thing in its own site move guide if you want the official version.

Then do the boring-but-essential walkthrough yourself:

• Click through your top five pages. Do they load on the new name?
• Do images show up, or are there broken-image icons?
• Type your old address in the browser. Does it forward to the new one?
• Is the padlock showing?
• Submit your contact form as a test. Does the email still reach you?

Don't forget the stuff outside WordPress

Redirects handle Google search. They do not touch your Google Business Profile, your Yelp page, or the map listings that send local customers your way. Those still point at the old name until you change them by hand. Walk through that here: Don't Forget Your Local Listings When You Change Domains.

One more: keep paying for the old domain for a good while. It's what makes your redirects work. For how long, see How Long Should You Keep Paying for Your Old Domain?

That's the whole move. Back up, connect, change the address, fix the links, redirect, keep the lock, tell Google. Done in order, nothing breaks.

Still deciding whether a better name is even worth the trouble? Browse names for your city and trade, or ask us about one specific domain you have in mind — it takes about a minute either way, and there's no pressure to buy.