Namecheap Wordpress migration

ed79 · 29 Oct 2019 at 10:57

I have a Wordpress site on Namecheap shared hosting. It's all running fine and I'm not looking to change; however:-

I own 2 domain names - that's say dom1.com and dom2.com. My hosting account was created for dom1.com but is no longer hosting anything. When I later bought dom2.com I installed WP as an add-on domain under dom1 hosting account.

Now, dom1 is about to expire and I don't want/need to renew it. I've been on to Namecheap support asking about making dom2 the main domain and the part that worries me is:-

The files of an old domain will be re-assigned to the new domain. This means the new main domain will be pointed to the /public_html folder that may contain your old files of the previous main domain. Some configuration changes will be needed to your website once the domain name is changed.

The URL references in the database will not be reassigned to a new domain, and this will most likely corrupt the working website and highly developed CMS. The appropriate database changes should be made in this case.

I'm not reassured by supports answer to this so and I don't know what is going on inside Wordpress that may be broken. Can anyone help with what changes would be needed to Wordpress if dom2.com is made the hosting domain?

If you've made it this far - many thanks!

touch · 29 Oct 2019 at 13:35

WordPress has a lot of occurances of the URL stored in it's database. For example, you might have an "About Us" page on dom1.com/about-us which has a line in the content saying "For more information, Contact Us" Which has a link to dom1.com/contact-us.
The reply you've got from their support is saying that they don't go through the database and change these references to the new URL. This example would simply mean that the hyperlink on the page links to the old site which is no longer in use but there are other ways that WordPress uses the URL and will likely break the entire site if they are wrong.

There's a plugin called GoLive Update URLs which will search through the database and update them all for you. It can be a bit tricky to do because your site will only work on 1 URL at a time. If you change URLs from dom1.com to dom2.com, it'll stop working on dom1.com so you need to make sure the dom2.com domain is setup ready to run the website otherwise you wont be able to change it back because the admin page you need to use will now be dom2.com/wp-admin but you cant access that because the domain isnt set up. (You can restore a backup of the database though and it'll change back to the old URL)

edit: Just to be clear, hyperlinks on the page linking to the old URL is just one example of how the URL might be stored in the database, going through all your pages and updating the links wont be enough enable you to change the URL. You need to do a full search through the database.

Beansprout · 29 Oct 2019 at 23:47

The 'Go live update URLs' plugin is a great one but sometimes won't do everything - if you have any issues after that, try this tool:

https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

ed79 · 30 Oct 2019 at 13:53

Thanks guys. It's a fairly small site so not too much to check through, but it is making me a bit of money in amazon commissions so I think it's best for me to wait until after black friday etc before messing around with anything.