Site owners regularly add, edit information on their resource. The relevance, reliability of information is one of the main building blocks in the foundation of site popularity. Sometimes the changes concern more global aspects of the site’s life - there is a need to transfer the entire resource to a new domain.

Why copy a site to a new domain.

There may be a lot of reasons. The main situations when it becomes necessary to transfer a site to a new domain are as follows:

The owner decided to assign a new address with a more beautiful domain name (usually moving to a shorter domain);
The old address fell under the influence of the AGS or another filter of search engines Yandex and Google;
The site is not indexed in search engines (perhaps the domain was previously under the filter);
The site was located on a free domain of the 3rd or 4th level, became popular, and the owner wants to acquire a normal domain name.

Other variations are possible, according to which the owner decides to copy the site to another domain. The main thing is to correctly transfer the site easily only to experienced webmasters, beginners in this matter will have to work hard so as not to make mistakes.

To transfer, you will need to create a backup copy of the site - its files and database.

Database backup:

First of all, you should make a backup copy of all the information that is available on the site. The backup file is called a dump (from the English snapshot). Most of the sites working on content management systems today store databases in the MySQL format.

You can copy the dump for yourself using the utility PHPMyAdmin, which allows you to export and archive the resource database in a few clicks, and then save it on the user's machine.

Uploading the archive with the files of the old site to the new domain.

With any type of new site, the transfer of information from a webmaster’s computer to a new resource is most conveniently done using the FTP protocol.

There are several simple programs that make it possible to transfer files from a computer directory to a hosting:

Total Commander;
WinSCP;
FileZilla
etc.

Change internal absolute links.

Absolute links on the site reflect the full URL. When transferring a site to a new domain, it is better to fix the link on the old page so that the address in them no longer includes the domain. Thus, these links will remain working, as well as relative, even after changing the domain.

The easiest way to fix internal links containing the old site address is to open the database dump using the code editor and replace the old address with a new one.

Does the site work after the move?

To quickly start work before releasing the resource “to the public,” you can create an additional line in the hosts file, consisting of two entries: server address and domain name of the resource. This will allow you to preliminarily check whether the resource that survived the transfer to the new domain is functioning.

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How to copy a site to my domain?