How to Change Your Domain Name in WordPress: A Step-by-Step Guide

As businesses start offering new products or services, or entering new markets, changing the business strategy might become inevitable. This includes aligning your domain name with your brand value. In addition to providing a readable address, a domain name is the unique address for a website and it also represents your brand. With that in mind, the domain should reflect your brand’s goals and missions. Fortunately, changing a domain name is a straightforward process. This article will show you how to do so for a WordPress site.

Things to Do Before You Change Your Domain Name

For the most part, the steps to change the WordPress domain are simple, but some tasks will require you to tweak your site’s PHP code. Thus, before we start, we recommend completing these three preliminary tasks.

Backup Your Current Site
Access to a Hosting Dashboard or an FTP Client
Research for a New Domain Name

How to Change Domain Name in WordPress

Now, let’s move on to the process of changing your WordPress site’s domain name. We have divided the process into six steps, and here’s a quick overview:

Purchase a New Domain Name
Add the New Domain Name and Upload the Backup
Copy All WordPress Core Files From Your Old Domain
Change the URL and Site Address
Reset URL Structure
Redirect an Old WordPress Domain Permanently

Why Change Your Domain Name

Generally, most businesses and companies stick to their initial domain name and build their marketing strategies around it. However, sometimes changing a domain name is necessary. Here are the most common reasons:

Rebranding
Domain extension change
Create a user-friendly site URL
Merging multiple domains

Conclusion

There could be many reasons to change the WordPress domain name. Luckily, WordPress provides built-in URL address settings. This functionality allows you to manually tweak the PHP code through a file manager or an FTP client to change your domain effectively. There are a lot of steps involved when changing your WordPress domain. With the correct implementation, you won’t lose any SEO benefits either. Whichever method you end up using, we recommend following best SEO practices to ensure that your new domain will rank high on the SERPs.

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