customize the domain name of your WordPress website

There may be several reasons for wanting to change the domain name of your WordPress website. For example, you might want to add or remove “www,” add https or switch to a new domain name entirely.

Supplies:

• make sure the DNS of the new domain name already points to the ip address of your website (read how here )

a brief warning

The decision to change your website’s domain name should never be made lightly. Changing the domain name has a big impact on the findability of your website. Do you have an existing website and is the indexing of your pages in search engines important to you? Then you will first need to research “301 redirects” to ensure that search engines do not remove your website’s indexed pages from their results.

a brief introduction

Changing the domain name of your WordPress website has two parts. We first modify the domain name on which WordPress is installed and then, with the help of a plugin, we are going to modify all references to the old domain name to the new domain name.

Step 1: customize the WordPress domain name

1. Navigate to the Dashboard of your WordPress website. In our case https://www.janjansen.nl/admin
2. Click on ‘Settings’
3. Now adjust the next two fields:
   • WordPress address (URL): the new domain name for your website
   • Site address (URL): the same new domain name for your website
     
4. Now click on ‘Save changes’

Your WordPress website can now be reached through the new domain name and no longer through the old domain name.

Step 2: update all references to the old domain name

To make sure all internal links and images work again we are going to change all references to the old domain name. We are going to do this using a plugin.

1. Navigate to the Dashboard of your WordPress website. In our case https://www.janjansen.nl/admin
2. Click on ‘Plugin’ and then ‘New plugin’
3. Now search for ‘Better Search Replace’
4. Click on ‘Install now’
5. Click on ‘Activate’
6. Now click on ‘Tools’ in the left menu bar and then ‘ Better Search Replace’
7. Then enter the following information:
   • Search for: the full address of the old domain name. In our case: http://www.janjansen.nl
   • Replace with: the full address of the new domain name. In our case: https://janjansen.nl
   • Select tables: select all tables (Mac: ⌘ + A or Windows: Ctrl + A)
   • Run as test: leave this checked for now
8. Click‘Perform search/replace’
9. At the top of the page, you can now see what would be replaced if “Run as test?” was not checked.
10. If everything seems fine now uncheck “Run as test?” and click“Run search/replace” again

Done! Your old domain name is now fully converted to the new domain name