How to Change Your WordPress Domain (Without Losing Traffic or Email)

Changing a domain is easy to start and easy to get half right. The site loads on the new address, but images still point at the old one, the old domain’s search traffic disappears, and email sent to the old address bounces.

We move WordPress sites to new domains for clients, and the people who change domains have good reasons: a rebrand, a better .com, a merger, or folding several sites into one. We do not try to talk anyone out of it. This guide is the process we follow, including the parts other guides skip.

Before you change the domain

A domain change affects your search rankings, your email and every link to your site. If search traffic does not matter much to your business, some of this can be lighter. If it does, plan first:

• List every page on the current site. You will need it to redirect each old page to its new address. A crawl of the site, plus your top pages in Search Console, gives you the list.
• Decide what happens to email. If your email addresses use the old domain, decide now whether they move, stay, or forward. More on that below.
• Get the new domain ready. Add it to your hosting account and make sure it has an SSL certificate before you switch anything, so the new address loads securely from the first minute.
• Back up the site and the database. Make a fresh backup right before the change, so you can undo it if something goes wrong.
• Pick a quiet day. We only make changes like this Monday through Thursday, so there is time to catch problems before the weekend.

How to change your WordPress domain, step by step

These steps are for keeping the same host and changing only the domain. If you are moving to a new host at the same time, follow our WordPress migration guide first, then change the domain.

1. Point the new domain at your hosting. Add the new domain to your hosting account, update its DNS, and install an SSL certificate. Wait until https://yournewdomain.com loads your hosting before going further.
2. Back up. Take a fresh backup of the files and the database, and confirm it finished.
3. Replace the old address in the database. This is the step people get wrong. WordPress stores your full address in thousands of places: links in posts, image paths, menus, page builder layouts and plugin settings. Many of those are stored in a packed format that breaks if you use a plain find-and-replace. Our go-to tool is the free Better Search Replace plugin, which handles that format safely.
4. Do a dry run first. In Better Search Replace, search for your full old address, such as https://oldname.com, and replace it with https://newname.com. Select all tables, leave “Replace GUIDs” unchecked, and tick “Run as dry run.” It shows how many changes it would make without changing anything.
5. Run it for real. Untick the dry run and run it again. Then run it once more for the www version of the old address if your site ever used www.
6. Check both addresses. Go to Settings, then General. WordPress Address and Site Address should both show the new domain. If they are greyed out, they are set in wp-config.php and need to be changed there.
7. Re-save permalinks and clear caches. Go to Settings, then Permalinks, and click Save Changes. Then clear your caching plugin, your host’s cache and any CDN.
8. Test everything. Log out and test in a private window: the homepage, inner pages, blog posts, images, forms, the checkout on a store, and logging in. View the page source and search for the old domain to catch anything that was missed.

Leave “Replace GUIDs” unchecked. WordPress’s own documentation says the GUID column should never be changed, because RSS feed readers use it to know which posts they have already shown.

Only changing the site URL?

Many people searching “change WordPress URL” just need to switch from http to https, or from www to non-www, on the same domain. The same steps apply on a smaller scale: update both addresses in Settings, then General, run Better Search Replace for the old version of the address, and redirect the old version to the new one.

Redirect the old domain the right way

Once the new domain works, the old domain has to send everyone to it with permanent 301 redirects. How you do it matters:

• Page to page. oldname.com/services/ should go to newname.com/services/, not to the new homepage. Google warns that sending many old addresses to one unrelated page such as the homepage may be treated as a “soft 404.”
• One hop. Each old address should go straight to its final new address, not through a chain of redirects.
• Every version. Cover http and https, and www and non-www, of the old domain.
• Pages that changed or went away. If a page has a new address on the new site, redirect it there. If it is gone for good with no replacement, let it return “gone” rather than forcing it somewhere unrelated.
• Keep them in place. Google says to keep the redirects as long as possible, generally at least a year.

If the old and new domains point at the same hosting, a server rule can redirect the whole old domain, keeping each page’s path. If your old site’s page addresses changed too, you need a redirect map that lists each old address and its new one. Our guide to WordPress 404 errors covers the redirect rules we follow on every site.

Tell Google with Change of Address

Google Search Console has a Change of Address tool built for domain moves. It tells Google to move your old domain’s search presence to the new one.

1. Verify both domains in Search Console with the same Google account. You must be an owner of both.
2. Put the 301 redirects in place first. The tool checks a few of your pages for working redirects before it accepts the move.
3. Open the old domain’s property, go to Settings, then Change of Address, choose the new domain, and submit.
4. Cover every version. If you have separate properties for www and non-www, submit Change of Address for each.
5. Submit the new sitemap in the new domain’s property.

Google says the move runs for 180 days, and to keep the redirects in place for at least that long, longer if the old domain still gets search traffic. Expect some ups and downs in rankings while Google catches up.

Keep your old email working

Email is the part people forget. If your addresses are on the old domain, they keep working only as long as the old domain’s email records stay in place. Whether customers should email you at the new domain is your call, and there are a few ways to handle it:

• Add the new domain as an alias so the same mailbox receives mail sent to either address.
• Switch everything to the new domain and keep the old addresses forwarding into it.
• Migrate the mailboxes to the new domain with their history.

Whichever you choose, we keep the old domain’s email working and flowing into the new domain, so nothing sent to an old address gets lost. Do not change the old domain’s email records until the new setup is tested. Update your email signatures, business cards and any forms that send email from the old address.

Should you keep the old domain?

How long to keep paying for the old domain is your decision. Just know what happens if you let it go. Expired domains are often bought at auction, sometimes by people who want the traffic and the trust that still comes with your old name. We have seen several dropped domains turned into scam sites, one of them infecting visitors’ computers with malware. Anyone who still has an old link, email or bookmark ends up there, and it can look like it is still your business.

Keeping the old domain registered and redirecting is cheap insurance. If you do let it go, make sure customers, directories and anywhere else that links to you have been updated first.

Locked out after changing the URL?

If you change WordPress Address or Site Address in Settings and the site or dashboard stops loading, you can set the addresses in wp-config.php instead. Open wp-config.php with your host’s file manager or FTP and add these two lines above the line that says “That’s all, stop editing!”, using your working address:

define( 'WP_HOME', 'https://yourdomain.com' );
define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'https://yourdomain.com' );

Save the file and reload. Once you can log in and everything is fixed, you can leave the lines in place or remove them.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes.
2. Google Search Console Help, Change of Address tool.
3. WordPress, Moving WordPress (serialized data and the GUID note).
4. WordPress.org, Better Search Replace.