How Not To Do A Site Migration

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, April 27, 2009 Leave a comment

Matt Cutts is changing his domain name. The interesting thing is he is changing several things at once and using a 302 redirect, which is temporary. Ordinarily, this isn’t the way you’d do it. Matt says so himself:

Note: changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.

Also, if you were truly moving a site, a 302 redirect wouldn’t be the right redirect to use–a 301 (permanent) redirect would be better.

Which brings up the question, How should you do it?

If you were truly moving your site from one domain name to another, I’d recommend that you start with the move to a new domain itself. That way, if something goes wrong with that then you can just delete the redirect you’ve placed on your old site and go back to the way it was. Very easy to do. If I were doing this move, I’d do it in the following order:

  • Buy a domain name and redirect the old site to the new one
  • Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress
  • Change to a new theme
  • Change hosts and IP address


Alternatively, you could move the first step to last and do all of your onsite changing first before you move. But you certainly don’t want to do it all at the same time.

Also, you definitely want a 301 redirect if you are planning your move on a permanent basis, but using a 302 redirect is a good way to test your new home. If it doesn’t work out then you can just replace your new .htaccess file with the old one and go back to your old domain name. That’s certainly a lot easier to do.

How would you perform a move to a new domain name like this?

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