How to Migrate Your Blog to a New Domain

Recently, we migrated this blog from a .co domain to a .com domain. Simultaneously, we also transitioned to Vultr as our hosting provider while making the move to the new domain.

I started this blog in September 2015, as indicated by the billing history from my previous hosting provider.

Why did I change the hosting provider?

I had been using my previous hosting provider from 2015 until August 2023. However, we have now switched to Vultr as our hosting provider.

The sole reason is that I have several other VPS servers with Vultr for my clients. With my previous hosting, I only had one server. I wanted to consolidate them all in one place for easier maintenance and periodic review.

In this blog, I will outline the steps we followed to migrate to a new server along with the new domain.

Moving your established blog to a new domain can be a strategic step to refresh your online presence or align better with your niche. However, executing a seamless migration requires a more advanced approach.

Disclaimer: By using the provided links for Vultr hosting, you grant us a small commission that helps sustain our blog, while also receiving credits to spin up your new server.

Backup

I took a complete backup of my images and database as the initial step with the previous hosting provider. I ensured their safety while proceeding with the following tasks.

Infrastructure

Being familiar with technology, I know how to set up VPS servers with Linux OS. I created a new server, set it up with the latest Ubuntu version, and configured Linux, Nginx, and PHP with necessary modules.

After sorting out the server and SSL setup, I tested everything by pointing them to a new IP using local host changes on my machine.

Vultr provides the option to manage DNS directly from their user dashboard, making it easy to set up simple DNS for the domain hosted on the server.Therefore, we've leveraged DNS management directly within the Vultr dashboard.

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SSL

We utilize Cloudflare to safeguard our blog against DDoS attacks and benefit from its CDN and DNS services. They also offer free SSL certificates, which is great. While setting up and updating the SSL, I found that the SSL certificate I was using didn't work for the new testing.

So, we had to create new SSL keychains and set them up again.

Migration

Once the server setup was done and ready for migration, we cloned the code from the repository and moved assets, images, the database, and cron jobs.

Using Cloudflare was particularly helpful for DNS. We quickly changed the IP to point to the new server, smoothly transitioning my existing blog to the new domain within minutes.

SEO

Once the migration was complete, we set up a new property in Google Search Console. Additionally, we marked the old property to indicate that the site was moving to a new domain.

Furthermore, to ensure that my Google indexed pages remained consistent, we promptly submitted the new pages for indexing by Google.

To accomplish this, we updated the sitemap link, enabling Google to crawl the pages daily.

The website is up on the new server after the move. If you find any mistakes or have concerns, please let us know using the Contact Us page.

Conclusion

Thanks for checking out our migration process. Stay tuned for more blog posts in the future.

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