Moving Your Website to a Different Domain

twi similar dogs inside a cardboard box with the words copying wordpress to a new domain

Cloning WordPress with Softaculous

If you are on a hosting account that has Softaculous to manage WordPress installs, you can clone your site right from the Softaculous dashboard.

At the bottom of your installation on softaculous, you’ll see this menu:

 

When you click “Clone” you can select which URL to clone to.

In the next step, you can choose to name the site something different, but if you are truly moving to the new domain permanently, leave the field blank.

Scroll to the bottom and select Clone Installation.

Once you’ve cloned and thoroughly tested your new site, consider deleting your old site installation and redirecting your old URL to the new one.

Cloning WordPress with a Free Plugin

My favorite plugin for cloning WordPress wesbites is Duplicator. To use this plugin, you’ll need cPanel access or FTP access to your hosting account.

The free version will suffice for smaller websites, which is usually what you are dealing with when you’ve recently launched your website. Search for “duplicator” in the Add Plugins screen.

image of wordpress plugins search results for the search term duplicator, an arrow points at the plugin Duplicator – WordPress Migration & Backup Plugin

Install and activate the plugin. Once you’ve activated, refresh and you should be taken to this screen:

screenshot leading with Welcome to Duplicator. there is a large orange button that says create your first package

 

Click the “Create Your First Package” button. The next screen will show some details. You can simply click “Next.”

The next screen should show all green (my site is large and I would use Duplicator Pro to clone).

Click “Build” and you’re files will be generated.

Installing on a New Domain

 

Duplicator actually has very detailed instructions for this here. We’ll just give you a run down on what the basic process looks like here.

1. If you haven’t already, add your new domain to your hosting account as an add-on domain.

2. Do to the SQL Database tool in your cPanel and create a new database and database user. Give the user all permissions for the new database.

3. Using your FTP application on your computer (Filezilla, Cyberduck are both pretty easy to use), upload your 2 Duplicator files to your add-on domain’s folder. 

4. In your browser, navigate to yournewaddondomain.com/installer.php and you’ll be guided to enter your database and database user info. After that, the installation process is pretty much done. 

Once again, Duplicator has very thorough instructions here and other options for installation that might wrk better for you here. 

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