Moving Entire Wordpress site to new domain

[NickM]

I want to move an entire existing Wordpress site from the current domain onto a new domain and 301 all pages. All permalinks will be the same.

1. Is there any easy way to accomplish this?
2. Can I Take my existing WP database and simply install it onto a new domain?
3. What is the best way to handle redirects? Any way to mass redirect?

Thanks in advance.

[kdollar]

I did this recently and used this tutorial.

Move your WordPress blog to a new domain in 10 steps! - Yoast - Tweaking Websites

[NickM]

Good link. I should have known to check Joost's site first.

[Unknown Webmaster]

I would make a redirect for each page so anybody who try to visit a page on the old domain gets sent to that exact page on the new domain.

If the URL structure on the 2 sites is the same, you could also add some clever code to do this automatically. I'm not confident enough in my .htaccess-coding-skills to give advice on how to do it, but it is definitely possible.

If you want to go the latter route, there are some information on this page:
Redirect Visitors To a New Page or Site - HTML Tips and Tricks
(look at the examples that force www and non-www on the site)

[zerotrouble]

I recently did it with one of my wordpress based sites. Quite easy, only problem I encountered was mod security which my host was kind enough to fix

Wordpress has official documentation for it Changing The Site URL WordPress Codex

[johnmac009]

first thing you need to do is backup your database.

[TheShortStack]

Bookmarked - I think I may well end up doing the same thing shortly.

Thanks for the links.

[TheShortStack]

Just to follow up on this, can anyone help me out with the changes that need to be made to the .htaccess file.

I need a line that says all pages on the old domain should redirect to exactly the same URL structure on the new domain.

So basically www.abc.com/review/pokerstars

should re-direct to:

www.xyz.com/review/pokerstars

I presume there must be a one line piece of code that I can use to do this, rather than having to set up 301's for each individual page.

Thanks a lot

[zerotrouble]

^
Try this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</ifmodule>
# END WordPress

[NickM]

UPDATE: I finally sacked up and did this myself after trying unsuccessfully to pay someone to do it.

My hosting has Fantastico, so the best instructions I found are here: Moving WordPress WordPress Codex

At the bottom, there is a guide for "Moving WordPress to a New Server with Fantastico"

This was super easy to do. I would recommend following these instructions for anyone in the same situation.

I then redirectd the site by creating a .htaccess file on the old domain with one line of code:

Redirect 301 / http:// www. newdomain .com/

(Without the spaces in the domain. The [code] tag is freaking out.)

This successfully redirects all old pages to their counterpart on the new domain.

Very simple once I got the process figured out. I could do the whole thing now in about 5 minutes if/when I have to do it again.

Hope this helps.