How to Change Domain Name in WordPress

hey thank you so much for watching the Press Avenue YouTube channel my name is John and today we're going to talk about changing your url or your domain name within WordPress now it seems pretty straightforward but WordPress leaves out quite a bit uh so I wanted to walk you through it as I was changing a particular domain name uh so you can see it all right so to head on over um first I will say you need to have the domain in your control panel for your hosting provider I thought about doing this for C panel and some other custom ones or WP engine but it's simply attaching and pointing the domain name to your server um if you do want to see that please let me know in the comments otherwise we'll assume that has already been done for you um if it hasn't then you definitely need to do that so you buy the domain name or you already own one and you point it towards your um server so this can either be via an a record or a c name based on your setup I use WP engine they've always done a records and they've just changed to C names it's just based on how the host likes to handle things all right so I've pointed a name towards my control panel on the host that I have so that's step one that we've missed in this bit here next we're going to head over to Wordpress and log in when you log in of course it'll look something like this and then go to general settings now if you go to settings and general that's how I got there I did it to this so you wouldn't see my email and send me emails directly I'd love to just have your comments uh Below in YouTube or wherever else this is posted all right so this current site is the buys.com uh which is a separate Channel I do for Tech Home Tech surveillance Etc at your house um and I'm changing it to to nerd techdad and I want to change it within WordPress so again settings in general so site title I guess while we're here we will change the site title the WordPress address URL we'll type the same thing in or whatever yours is and I usually just copy and paste it here um typically those are exactly the same right now you may notice it's only http um I want to change over the domain first get a let's encrypt SSL certificate which I have videos on how to do that and then change this uh the admin email of course would be that and then you scroll to the bottom and hit save after saving it'll say settings saved and you'll see your new URL in both these spots the WordPress address and the site address now it might take you a few times to refresh and see it and I already started to change it before this video and realized hey I should help some people out so I've refreshed several times it took mine maybe about 15 minutes to clear over who knows why sometimes it's 15 seconds um so now you can see it there but within WordPress itself the original domain name is all over the place uh it can be hardcoded in it can be on images it can be in other places so instead of showing a 404 or not found uh there's one more step and that is to head over to plugins and go to add new and we're going to add a plugin called better search and replace so better search I think that might just get it

done and it's right here as BSR with a magnifying glass with the database symbol inside of it so better search forl a simple plugin to update URLs and other texts within the database uh and WP engine bought this out I believe within a year within the last year I could be wrong but I used this long before they bought it out uh and it's been good and they haven't ruined it so that is kudos to them you can see here um I always look for the last time things were updated if it's compatible with my latest version and anything with a million plus active installs uh is usually pretty darn good so go ahead and hit activate give it a second here all right and now it's activated and you can see it right here better search and replace next we're going to come down to tools and then better search replace go ahead and click and then um this is the um kind of option screen to do this um I've actually never upgraded to the big one here but they do have an upgrade which lets to preview Expressions migrate full sites import export email support Etc this has always been topnotch on the free version for me so I'm going to search for the old domain or whatever your old domain is and you don't need HTTP https now when we do switch to an SSL certificate which I think I'll make a whole separate video of um I would then search for uh HTTP and your old domain name https and your old domain name and replace it strictly with an https only on the new domain um so type this in now a big thing about this is it's a really powerful to Tool I would double triple check what you're replacing especially when you're doing URLs or you can completely break the site um so if you have to you know you can go up here and copy this and paste it down here and know that you typed it in correctly now it'll give you a dry run and we'll see it but next we select tables you can either pick and can choose any table you want if you know the particular table that you want to change or I just do control a or command a and select all of them then I come down here case sens insensitive um searches for case sensitive by default um I think everything's lowercase but I can definitely turn this on um replace du ids's um I usually don't mess with this there's reasons for it but in this scenario there is and then lastly run as a dry run and this is my favorite part of the plugin it's basically going to search for this URL uh and if it finds it you know replace it with this but it's not going to do anything it's just going to tell me how many times it comes up so I'm going to go ahead and hit run search and replace so right now you can see it processing um I know I think I'm rate limited on this machine so it's not going to fly through but yours may definitely be faster um so we'll just give it one moment

waiting waiting

waiting if this is helpful in any way go ahead and give it a thumbs up again if you have any questions let me know in the comments below I'd love to help and it looks like we are almost there if this was a bigger like one out of a thousand tables I'd just pause the video so now now it's returning so now it says dry run which is what we did that means nothing nothing has been changed searched 48 tables 1385 cells were found that needed to be updated and zero changes were made so this uh old URL uh was found quite a few times um click here for more details or use the form below so we might as well click here and it shows here how long it took each one and it comes down here and we have um WP GF which is is actually gravity forms uh entry data that's a big chunk of them right there some of the wp options so that' be under the site title post meta in in post directly come down here and then um link clicks so this particular Blog has ta is thirsty Affiliates um and it uses um it's probably hardcoding the links in and that's why we have 894 them and then under WP users a user which most likely is myself um has that as well so if you're happy with what you see on your end then we can uncheck dry run so we're good with this now we're going to uncheck this and we're going to commit so what it's going to do is it's going to run through all these tables and change all these options for us so go ahead and hit run search and replace and I should have said you know a couple minutes ago when we started this make sure you back up your site before you done into this uh you can back up in C panel you can back up in other custom control panels there are several plugins to do so if you need any options or want to hear about it just let me know in the comments if not we'll just move on but always take a backup I Didn't Do It initially because mine backs up every morning every day um so I don't have to think about hey I just mess this whole thing up by changing it to the wrong URL and now it won't load blah blah blah Etc Etc so that's how it works so phone call made all right so now it says during the search for replace we search 48 tables like before with 1385 cells changed with 1,385 updates so now everything that had my old domain is now switched over to the new domain and that's it so I wish WordPress did have in this settings area under General a warning saying just because you changed it here doesn't mean it's it's changed everywhere but here we are and that's why we make these videos to help you guys out so that kind of sums it up um there isn't anything else to show you unless I dug through the site to find the code of these but you get the general idea find this is a small site finding 1,385 on a small site would be horrible doing it manually uh on a bigger site I've seen these numbers be with an extra zero or two on this on the end of it uh so it's just something to keep in mind anyway that's it again this is John from press Avenue if this was helpful go ahead and give it a thumbs up if you want to see more WordPress videos like this please subscribe and let me know what you think in the comments thanks so much