Moving website from the old domain to the new one

Question

I'm a new in web development so the question is maybe pretty simple, but I can't handle it by myself.

I have a wordpress website which hosts on hostmonster.com and it has a URL, let's say, http://aaa.com/bbb.org. So it is located in the subdirectory bbb.org of the main directory http://aaa.com in my host monster account.

I also have a domain name, let's say, http://bbb.org on godaddy.com and now I want to make my site available on address http://bbb.org. How to do that?

I did the following thing. I forwarded http://bbb.org to http://aaa.com/bbb.org in settings on godaddy.com, but it's not what I need, because user still see old address (http://aaa.com/bbb.org) in his address line. So what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Make sure to follow the above answers. But using the The Duplicator plugin will streamline the actual Wordpress website migration very easily.

Answer 2

I think you don't want to redirect from http://aaa.com/bbb.org.If so you will be need 5 step.

STEP 1: TRANSFERRING FILES

The first step in moving your website to your new domain name is to create an account on your server or shared hosting plan for the new domain and then transfer over all of the old website files to the new account you have created for the new domain. Be sure to just copy the files over and do not in any case delete the files from the old account for the old domain name yet.

STEP 2: CHANGE NAMESERVERS

Be sure and change the nameservers of the new domain name to point to the newly created account that you have created on your server or shared hosting plan. Keep in mind that it will typically take between 48 and 72 hours for the DNS to propogate throughout the web.

STEP 3: CHANGE FILES

The next step is to change all instances of the old domain to the new domain within the files that you have transferred over to the new account on your server. You will most likely be able to accomplish this very quickly if you just use the find and replace feature in your FTP client (i.e. Dreamweaver, FileZilla, etc.). Making all of your links absolute links rather than relative links is usually the best way to go for SEO purposes so if this is something that you had ever considered changing over then now would be a good time to go through and audit all of your website files to change relative links to absolute when appropriate.

STEP 4: CREATE 301 REDIRECTS

Setting up 301 redirects in your .htaccess (assuming you have a Linux server) under your old account is very important. A 301 redirect will work to automatically and permanently redirect visitors and search engine bots who visit www.olddomain.com/my-page to www.newdomain.com/my-page. This is very important from an SEO perspective because 301 redirects have the potential to pass through the “link juice” of any backlinks pointing to the old domain to the new domain along with any accompanying search engine rankings. This is also very important from a user perspective because anyone that tries to visit any page on your old domain will be automatically sent to the appropriate page on your new domain. Read this guide on how to set up 301 redirects to get all of the nitty gritty 301 redirect setup details.

STEP 5: TEST

Make sure that your nameservers have been set up on your new domain and that the DNS has finished propogating. Once you verify that the DNS is resolving correctly for the new domain then it is time to test out all of the old pages that you are redirecting from the old domain to the new domain and then also test by looking through each page of the new site and make sure that there are no errors (from find and replace errors when changing files or other issues). If all of the pages of your old site have been indexed by Google then a quick way to test out that the 301 redirects have all been set up and working properly is to simply do an advanced Google search query that will return all of the pages from your old site indexed by Google. You can do this simply by typing “site:olddomain.com” into Google (without the “”). Now all you have to do is click on every page and if you have set up the 301 redirects properly then each time you click on the page link your server should automatically and instantly redirect you to the appropriate new page on your new domain.

That all you need ?

Answer 3

This sounds like a Masking problem, (you have enabled forwarding, but not masking) http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/422/forwarding-or-masking-your-domain-name

Also, note that you 301 redirects will be cached by clients, so use 302 redirects unless you are sure you've set it up the way you want it.

Answer 4

Typically, a hosting solution will have DNS redirecting that it will help you. The issue is that you might be using GoDaddy for your DNS managing. In which cause the redirecting DNS with hostmonster will not come through.

The best thing to do is have your GoDaddy point to the nameservers from HostMonster and have HostMonster control DNS. Then you can just create a redirect inside HostMonster and point bb.org it to http://aaa.com/bbb.org but your URL will just be bbb.org.