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How to change the domain name of a website

Mon, Jul 13, 2009

General

There are various reasons why you may want to change the domain name of a website that already existed. it could be because:

  1. Your domain name got expired, and someone else registered it.
  2. You don’t like your current domain name.
  3. You have a domain that better describes your contents, or its a better keyword for search engine positioning.

In that case, if you are going to continuing with your existing web host, you don’t have to copy the contents to a new place. Here is a simple way telling how to do it.

  1. Point the DNS of the domain name(in case you are using an external registrar like godaddy.com or name.com) to the name server provided to you by your hosting provider(for ex: yahoo). If you don’t know what your name server is, find it out by searching your current domain at http://who.is
  2. Go to your control panel in hosting account, and add this new domain. Point this new domain change to the folder in which you kept the index page of the current website.
  3. Now you can reach your homepage with the new domain name. But note that if you have recently changed the name server, it may take up to 72 hrs for the DNS to resolve. So be patient if things don’t work out straight away.
  4. Once the DNS is updated, and you can reach your homepage, you have to check whether you are able to access other pages within the site. If you had used absolute URLs, you have to change the links to relative links. If they were set originally as relative links, then it should work perfectly fine.
  5. Now you may want to redirect the existing traffic to your current website to the new domain name. This can be done by various ways. The best way is to setup a htacess redirect. This step, probably is for somewhat experienced users. Have patience, you may have to research a bit before doing it. In case you are using a good web host like hostgator or bluehost, ask the support to do the redirect job for you.

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