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If you own a business, you know the importance of a website, especially in today’s digital landscape. One vital aspect of every website is the domain name. Finding a great domain for your site comes with several benefits, such as making it easier for clients to find your business. If your current URL doesn’t deliver the expected result, you may have to change it. Before we describe how to change a site URL, let’s go over some definitions.
What's a Site URL?
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, a unique identifier that locates a resource on the internet, such as a specific page, website, or file. Every site URL consists of multiple parts, and each has varying effects on your search engine optimization and your site’s security.
A URL has four parts, including:
- Protocol: This part tells your browser how to communicate with a site server. Traditionally, most websites used HTTP, but there has been a recent adoption of HTTPS because it’s more secure.
- Domain name: This is the identifier of your website name, and it consists of two parts, the name of your site and the Top-Level Domain (TLD). TLD refers to .net, .org, or .com, among other designators.
- Path: This is the part of the URL after the TLD that directs the browser to a specific page of a website
- Webpage: This is the last part of a site URL with the requested path.
What's a Site URL Change?
A URL change is simply altering your existing site’s URL to a better domain that makes sense to your business or is easier to remember.
Why Do People Change a Site URL?
There are several reasons why people consider changing their site URL. Some of the major reasons include:
Rebranding or When Changing Industries
If you want to transition to a different industry or start selling different products, you can consider changing the domain name to reflect your new business name which makes it a good reason to change your URL. You can also consider maintaining your older domain and redirecting it to the new one. This helps to transfer over any SEO value.
You Want a Simpler or Shorter URL
Another reason to change your site URL is when considering a new TLD or you have purchased a new URL. This process requires less work since there aren’t any website changes needed. Also, when you migrate your site to a shorter domain, users won’t get puzzled when redirected to a different and longer domain.
How Do I Change My Site URL?
Once you decide to alter your site URL, here is how to do it and still maintain your rankings.
Conduct Due Diligence on the Destination Domain
If you purchase an older domain, do a thorough search on archive.org to see the history of the actual site pages displayed on it. If you get any results, check if there is any low-quality content or spam.
Review Backlinks and search Performance
Make an inventory of the existing SEO status to enable you to make a before and after comparison. Google Search Console avails lots of useful reports such as:
- Pages with usability issues on mobile devices
- How Google indexes your site
- Websites that are linking to yours
- How your URL performs in search results
Migrate the Site
The process of migrating your website files to a new domain depends on your hosting situation. If the new domain utilizes the same hosting service, the hosting company will most likely create a new folder. Simply copy the files to the new domain. On the other hand, if the new domain has a different hosting service, export the files from the old hosting location and upload them to the new host.
Add the Redirects from Your Old Domain
Redirects play a crucial part in driving traffic from your old domain to the new one and help Google understand your content has shifted to a different home. You need a wild card redirect to ensure that each page points to the new location. Add this redirect to the hosting account in the .htaccess file.
Inform Google About the Domain Change
Do this via the Change of Address feature on Google Search Console, which requires you to start by adding and verifying your new domain. Alternatively, you can submit sitemaps in GSC for your new and old domains. This way, Google is aware of all 301 redirects you have previously put.
Using WordPress.com Site
The easiest way to change your site URL is by accessing the WordPress admin area. Simply go to your settings, change the URLs under Site Address and WordPress Address options, and save changes. Make a WordPress database backup, then go to the web hosting dashboard and click the phpMyAdmin icon.
Alternatively, you can change the URLs directly in WordPress using PHPMyAdmin. Scroll down the options on the displayed table and locate the row with site URL and home options. Tap the pencil on the left to edit the rows and change the option value field to a new URL and save change via the Go button.
If you are unsure of your WordPress theme, you can use the wp-config.php file. Add the URLs to this file in the root folder of your site. Connect your site via the FTPO client and then edit the wp-config file to save changes.