Redback Studios

It’s easier today than ever before to build, maintain, and manage a website. Thanks to tools like WordPress, you no longer need to possess an understanding of programming language in order to create unique, well-developed websites for anything from a personal portfolio to a corporate website.

Over the past few years, WordPress has grown in popularity to become the platform of choice for millions of websites across the world. Part of the reason for this is WordPress’ ability to seamlessly integrate third-party software and coding, which adds much of the robust functionality that WordPress websites have come to be known for.

One area where WordPress truly shines is in the domain transfer process. In the past, transferring a website from one domain name to another could be a gruesome process which most website administrators would avoid whenever possible. While transferring a website from one domain isn’t the easiest thing you can do on WordPress, it is easy enough for most people to learn and do themselves, and without question far easier than it was a few years ago.

The following is a step by step process to follow when transferring your website from one domain to the other, and some important things to remember when doing so.

Wordpress Site Migration

First things first would be to install WordPress to your Bluehost account. You can install a blank version of WordPress to your Temporary URL.

Setup Managewp

Next you will want to sign up at ManageWP.com for a new account. You can use ManageWP for free by going to their home page, entering your email address, and clicking Try It For Free. Once you do this, you will automatically be taken to a window where you can add your existing website to your ManageWP dashboard.

Enter your site URL, username, and password. By doing this, ManageWP will automatically install the ManageWP plugin to your site and link the site to your ManageWP Dashboard. Then you will need to add your new website with your temporary URL to your ManageWP dashboard as well. To do this, click Add Website on the sidebar. Once you both websites are added to your dashboard on ManageWP, you can start the migration process.

Migrate Your Site

1. Click Clone/Migration in the Quick Access tool box.

2. Choose which website you wish to migrate. Your site should be listed under Existing Website. Click the website, then Next.

3. Once Manage WP has created a snapshot of your site, you will choose the destination. Select the site that you are migrating to, under Existing Website and click Next.

4. This should bring up a new window, reiterating which website you are cloning to. If this is correct, click the Clone button.

5. Once the cloning process has finished, you should be shown a message that the clone was successful. You can click Done.

Changing The url

Once you are done with the migration, you will need to change your name servers to point the DNS here. The name servers are ns1.BlueHost.com and ns2.BlueHost.com

Once the DNS is pointed here, you can change the WordPress URLs to reflect your domain name instead of the Temporary URL. Both the WordPress Address and the Site Address need to be the same and changed to your domain name.

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.

2. From Settings choose General

Then update the Home and Site URLs.

After updating the Home and Site URLs you will find that internal links to pages and references to images are not updated. Instead, these links and references will point to your old domain name. Velvet Blues will fix that problem by helping you change old urls and links in your website.

Then you just need to save your new URL settings by saving your permalinks. To do this, you will go to your Settings and click Permalinks. You shouldn’t have to make any changes, simply click theSave Changes button. This will make sure that all of the links on your site are now using your domain instead of the Temporary URL.