Moving Wordpress Site To Completely New Domain

[kcampbell648]

I need to be able to move wordpress sites to new domains. This is not really for SEO purposes just for something else that I'm doing.


I'm familiar with moving my wordpress files to a new host, and importing the database. I do this all the time manually with no problems.


But I've been searching and posting everywhere in forums and can't find the answer to this simple question.


Is there a way to move your wordpress site onto a new domain and have it appear exactly as the old site, but with all of the images hosted on the new domain, and links to inner pages on the new domain? (Also: have your domain.com/wp-admin link take you to login to the new site, not the old one)


In the past I have moved some sites to new domains but I always have problems that I can't completely fix- the image URLs are still hosted on the old domain, all of the inner page links are pointing to the old domain, the wp-admin login points to the old domain, etc.


I've seen people say "just buy BackupBuddy" and I am definitely willing to buy something to help me do this quickly on a lot of sites, but i just don't see what backup buddy actually does for this particular purpose- it basically just downloads your database and wordpress files, as you can do manually. One thing I have tried is going through the database file and replacing the old domain name with the new one and then uploading the database file to the new site- but that doesn't really work for some reason and still doesn't do what I want. I think getting the images to be hosted on the new site may be the hardest part of this.


I'm sure somebody knows the answer to this.

 

[Conor]

Easy. Backup the FTP directory in Filezilla, just copy your whole WP directory to your PC, and then upload it to your new hosting.

Backup your DB in PHPmyadmin. Open the backed up file in Notepad, do a "Replace All" on your old URL, with your new URL. Upload the updated backup to PHPmyadmin on the new hosting.

Done and dusted.

 

[FutureProofSeo]

Easy. Backup the FTP directory in Filezilla, just copy your whole WP directory to your PC, and then upload it to your new hosting.

Backup your DB in PHPmyadmin. Open the backed up file in Notepad, do a "Replace All" on your old URL, with your new URL. Upload the updated backup to PHPmyadmin on the new hosting.

Done and dusted.

Ye it's the database that contains the url references, just replace those and you're good to go.

FPS

 

[gruffalo]

Is this called domain mapping?

 

[FutureProofSeo]

Is this called domain mapping?

NO,

Domain mapping is done from your hosting providers control panel.

The OP was more concerned with the internal links, which are stored within the database.

Domain mapping is simply where the hosting company points your domain name, ie which files are retrieved when someone visits your site.

FPS