Checklist For Moving Domains

[Jeffro]

So I've been giving this some thought. I don't plan on selling Jeffro2pt0.com and it has a bunch of content that is search engine worthy. I also don't see the domain making for a good fit for me to write about personal things going on in life so I am thinking about transferring my Jeffro2pt0.com domain content to Jeffc.me. jeffc.me was an expensive purchase and I'd like to get some use out of it. Doing things this way ensures the personal aspect plus, I don't have the jeffro2pt0 moniker anymore. Instead, its jeffc as in Jeff Chandler. The domain is shorter and easier to remember as a bonus.

Even though there are plenty of guides explaining how to properly move from one place to another, I figured I would tap into the knowledgebase here to see if you guys and gals can give me a checklist of things to do. The most important thing to me is proper redirects and hopefully, a proper transfer of Page Rank from that domain to this one.

[davecoveney]

It depends how you wish to move the site - you have a content only move (trivially easy) and a full migration - the latter including the whole site, WP install, theme and so on. The latter is still quite hard to do because of the non-platform agnostic methods of storing data that WP and its many plugin and theme authors use. I'm talking about serialized PHP - which is pure evil, in my view, and leads to many failed migrations.

I wrote a script fix for that (see: http://www.davesgonemental.com/php-s...ss-migrations/ ) but it's hardly perfect - plan is to write something much more comprehensive in the near future. However, apart from widgets it fixes the majority of serialization problems that WP inflicts on us.

[GaMerZ]

Hmm,

I guess I can relate well here. For me, I moved http://lesterchan.net/blogs/ to http://lesterchan.net/ and upgraded from WP 1.5. to WP 2.6. Eventhough it is not really a domain move (in your case) but it is roughly the same issue.

I started out beta testing 1 year ago prior to the move in a subdomain to make sure that everything was working correctly on the live server (There are tons of PHP+Apache+MYSQL) configs out there)

I have also to make sure my htaccess redirect works. Because for me now /blogs/ is no longer a folder. Instead I move everything to root and has a new Nice Permalink in the form of /blog/year/month/day/post-name/. Also apart from the /blogs/ => /blog/ issue, I also have lots of custom pages that ends with .php instead of using WP Page system. I also have to move them to the page System. So /portfolio/programming.php => /portfolio/programming/php/

Here is the .htaccess that I am using:

# BEGIN WithoutWWW
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.lesterchan\.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://lesterchan.net/$1 [R=301,L]
# END WithoutWWW

# BEGIN Redirection
Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^/?blogs/archives/([0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/[-a-z]+)$ blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/?blogs/category/(.+)$ blog/category/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/?blogs/(.+)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/wp-archives\.php$ blog/archive/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/wp-calendar\.php$ blog/archive/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/wp-stats\.php$ site/statistics/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/wp-useronline.php$ site/users-online/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/wp-search\.php$ site/search/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^blogs/wp-polls\.php$ site/polls-archive/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/websites\.php$ portfolio/web-sites/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/programming\.php$ portfolio/programming/php/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/graphics\.php$ portfolio/graphics/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/animations\.php$ portfolio/animations/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^portfolio/resume\.php$ portfolio/resume/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^about/aboutme\.php$ about/me/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^about/hobbies\.php$ about/me/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^about/favourites\.php$ about/favourites/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^about/life\.php$ about/me/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^about/toys\.php$ about/toys/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^about/playlist\.php$ about/playlist/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^gallery/secondary\.php$ gallery/secondary/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^gallery/polytechnic\.php$ gallery/polytechnic/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^gallery/family\.php$ gallery/family/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^gallery/miscellaneous\.php$ gallery/miscellaneous/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^others/links\.php$ site/links/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^others/downloads/([^/]+)$ /wp-content/themes/lesterchan/downloads/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^others/feedback\.php$ site/contact-me/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^others/donation\.php$ site/donation/ [R=301,L]
# END Redirection

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

There is a lot of remapping of URL that takes place.

Sorry if this is out of point.

Here is a brief changelog for me: http://lesterchan.net/blog/2008/06/0...et-version-30/

[joetek]

If your permalink structure is staying consistant, it should be relatively straightforward. A simple:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

should do it. If the old domain is going away (or even if it isn't), you'll also want to search your post archives for any links to previous posts or links to uploaded images and update those urls as well.

Make sure you test examples of your old pages to make sure they all bounce properly. Posts, categories, tags, archives, pages... test 'em all!

Just don't do this:
http://gawker.com/5189745/times-nukes-itself-on-google

[Jeffro]

Thanks guys.

I'm thinking of just taking the WXR file for Jeffro2pt0 and transferring it to jeffc.me. So, the main thing that will need to happen is proper redirects of http://www.jeffro2pt0.com to http://www.jeffc.me in order to keep all of my image links in tact and what have you. If an article someone linked to on Jeffro2pt0.com disappears, would a redirect point them to the same article but on Jeffc.me? I don't want to break all of those links.

[conorp]

^^I'm sorry but is that spam^^