It’s Hard to Transfer Your WordPress Website to New Domain
You have a fully designed and functioning WordPress website that you have built over the past year. You’ve launched a successful affiliate marketing campaign, posted a lot of content, and have amassed a small audience. You’re looking to grow your site and figurehead as a brand, and make more money from your work. You’ve decided to take the plunge and switch your domain name from blog.example.com to your-new-blog.com.
To begin the process of changing your site’s address, you will need to perform the following steps:
1. Credentials (Personal and Professional)
The first thing you will need to do is to make sure that you have the necessary credentials to transfer your site. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use Hootsuite and 1and1 to make the transition as easy as possible.
Hootsuite is an all-in-one marketing platform that can help you connect with your audience, build credibility, and grow your business. With Hootsuite, you can:
- Create and schedule content across social platforms
- Establish yourself as an authoritative voice in your industry
- Measure the success of your efforts
- Optimize your blog for greater conversion
- and much more!
Hootsuite is owned by Facebook, so you can be rest assured that you’re not going to break the law by using the service as you know it. You can create multiple accounts if you’re working with a team, or want to explore the platform further on your own. You can get started for free, though you may need to enter your email address to complete the account setup process.
You will also need to verify your ownership of the www.example.com domain name in order to make the switch to the new domain. You can use a free domain checker like Checkify.com to easily verify the registration details of your domain name. You will simply need to enter your current website’s URL into the appropriate field, and then click the Check button to verify your domain.
Once you have verified the ownership of the domain, you can begin the process of transferring it to your new hosting server. You will need to log into your 1and1 hosting account and click the domain name menu item to access your domain’s settings. From here, you can update your A records (Alias) and CNAME records (Canonical Name) to point to your new host’s IP address.
2. Content Delivery Network (CDN) (Optimization And Performance)
When you make changes to your website’s address, you will want to take into consideration how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) affects your site’s performance in the search engines. You can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to make sure that your website’s files are always accessible and cachable from any visitor, regardless of their location. A CDN distributes content across a cluster of servers, so that when a visitor requests a resource on your site (e.g., an image from your blog), the content can be served quickly. This can significantly improve your site’s performance in the search engines and on mobile devices.
You can use tools like Pingdom, GT Metrix, and Woopra to track the performance of your website’s CDN build. For example, if you notice that your images are not appearing on some pages, but others are, you can use the metrics from these tools to pinpoint the cause of the issue.
CDNs provide many benefits to a digital marketer, and can help to bring your blog to the next level. The right CDN can provide the following benefits:
- Improved SEO.
- Faster page load times.
- More reliable delivery of content.
- And much more!
You can get started with a CDN for free, as long as you fulfill the required terms and conditions. You should begin to see noticeable performance improvements once you have signed up for the service.
3. Email Marketing (Single-Use Only)
One of the first steps you will need to take is to set up automated email campaigns on your new blog. The best way to do this is to use a free email marketing tool like MailChimp. With MailChimp, you can set up automated email marketing lists, and send out email campaigns with ease. You can also segment your list, target email marketing to specific groups of people, and much more. You can get started with just a few clicks, and there’s no lengthy registration process to worry about.
Now is the perfect time to integrate email marketing into your marketing plan, as more and more people are relying on online reviews and testimonials to make purchasing decisions. If you’re running an eCommerce store, you can also use email marketing to encourage customers to come back and make another purchase. You can set up automated email campaigns to send out notifications when a new product is released, discounts are available, etc. You can use the list you’ve built to send out personalized emails to your subscribers, letting them know that you’ve thought of them and are interested in their feedback. You can also use marketing automation software to streamline the process of sending out these emails, so that you can get back to focusing on growing and innovating your blog.
4. Backup
One of the best things about WordPress is the ease with which you can backup your site. You can use tools like One-Click Backup, Woofra, and Backupello to create automatic backups of your site, and restore them at any time, with the click of a button. This makes it easy to save your work, and ensure that you can always return to where you left off, without losing a page or a draft in the process.
You’ve built a wonderful blog, created amazing content, and attracted a decent sized audience. You’ve decided to take the plunge and change your blog’s address to a more professional one. You’ve prepared the necessary groundwork and made the decision to switch, but now you need to do a little bit of work to make it happen. Things couldn’t be simpler than this, but there are several steps you need to take in order to ensure a seamless transition.
You will begin to see improvements in your blog’s SEO within a few weeks of making these changes. You can also use free tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite to track the success of your efforts.