(Used for account hosted at GoDaddy.com)

After researching the WordPress forums, and other sources that listed options for changing a domain name or URL, I did not find one that convinced me that there is one method that works in all cases.

This is what worked for me.  It was relatively simple and did not take much time to complete.  I wanted to share it with others, in the hope that I can save others the time I spent researching how to change a WordPress domain name.

The steps are:  BACKUP your site,  CHANGE domain name, CHANGE the URL directly in the database.

1) Hosting Account => backup site and change domain name

Backup site

1. Go to My Account => Hosting => Launch => Databases => MySQL
2. Click pencil icon (Edit) under Action => Select Backup => click OK (May take up to 2 hrs)
3. Use an FTP program (Ex: Filezilla) to copy your completed database backup and all files off-site (to your PC)

Change domain name – Domain Name System (DNS)

1. Go to My Account => Hosting => Settings (top menu) => Change Domain Name (Edit Primary Domain box appears)
2. Enter new domain name ONLY (not entire URL address)  Ex: newdomain.com

(takes up to 24 hrs; I did this at 9 PM; DNS was changed by 8:30 AM in the morning)

2) phpMyAdmin => change the URL directly in the database

Log in to your Account Manager

1. From the Products section, click Web Hosting
2. Next to the hosting account you want to use, click Launch
3. In the Databases section of the Hosting Control Center, click MySQL
4. Next to the WordPress database, click Manage via phpMyAdmin
5. Enter the username and password for your database
6. In the left hand column, click ‘+’  beside your database name
7. Click ‘wp-options’
8. Click on the ‘Browse’ icon on the left in the top menu
9. Find siteurl in the ‘option_name’ column, click the Pencil (Edit) icon and change ‘option_value’ from http://www.OLDdomain.com to http://www.NEWdomain.com (where http://www.NEWdomain.com is your site’s new address and http://www.OLDdomain.com is your site’s old address)
10. Increment Page number to ‘2’, find home in the ‘option_name’ column and repeat step 9 to change ‘option_value’ from your site’s old address to site’s new address

To verify all occurrences of your site’s old address were changed to site’s new address

1. On the phpMyAdmin page, in the Left column, click the SQL icon in the middle
2. Enter the following in the text box that appears:   (remember the quotes ‘http… ‘)

UPDATE wp_options
SET option_value = ‘http://www.NEWdomain.com‘
WHERE option_value = ‘http://www.OLDdomain.com‘

(where http://www.NEWdomain.com is your site’s new address and http://www.OLDdomain.com is your site’s old address)

=> Click Go (Check information window to see if any other occurrences were changed)

If any graphics / other files do not appear on your site after the above changes:

1. Edit the pages of your WordPress site in HTML view
2. Enter ‘Ctrl + F’, then old site URL (Ex: http://www.OLDdomain.com), to Find any occurrences of old site URL
3. Replace any old site URLs with the new URL (Ex: http://www.NEWdomain.com)

Tags: dns, domain name change, phpmyadmin, WordPress

This entry was posted on August 11, 2010 at 11:33 AM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in WordPress by Daulton West 3 Comments