How-to · Intermediate · an afternoon plus monitoring
How to Move a Website to a New Domain
Everything you need to change the name over the door without losing the rankings or the regulars — the steps in order, the snag to watch, and the tip our support desk gives everybody.
Straight answer first
In a line: change the name over the door without losing the rankings or the regulars — a intermediate-level task that takes an afternoon plus monitoring.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Intermediate
Difficulty level
Quick
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and afternoon plus monitoring of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The whole job at a glance
From start to finish, you will build the site on the new name first, map every old url to its twin, tell search engines properly, update everything else and keep the old name redirecting for years yet.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
The mistake nearly everyone makes
Redirecting the whole old site to the new homepage. Search engines read that as 'those pages no longer exist', and the deep content that brought in most of your traffic vanishes from results within weeks.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
The shortcut, straight from the support desk
Change one thing at a time. Move the domain while the hosting stays put, or move the hosting while the domain stays put, but never both across the same weekend — otherwise nothing tells you which change caused what.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
How our platform shortens this
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
The hosting this guide is written against
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Backups run every day on every plan, and putting a file or a database back takes one click from the panel.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Written from real tickets
Our guides come off the support desk, so the snags flagged here are the ones people genuinely hit.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Scoped honestly
Change the name over the door without losing the rankings or the regulars is a intermediate-level task — this guide budgets an afternoon plus monitoring and says which steps the platform absorbs.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Build the site on the new name first
Copy the site across, or add the new domain to the account, then update internal links and the platform's own site-address settings. Click through the whole thing on the new name before anyone else does.
- 2
Map every old URL to its twin
Send each old address to its exact counterpart with a 301. Dumping everything on the new homepage destroys the deep-page rankings that were the reason you cared about this in the first place.
- 3
Tell search engines properly
Use Search Console's change-of-address tool on top of the redirects, keep both properties verified, and submit the new sitemap. The redirects do the work; this tells Google to expect them.
- 4
Update everything else
Analytics, ad accounts, social profiles, email signatures, directory listings, and any inbound links you can influence. Every stale reference left behind is a small leak that never quite stops.
- 5
Keep the old name redirecting for years yet
Renew the old domain for years and leave the redirects running. They are permanent infrastructure, not launch-week scaffolding you take down once the paint is dry.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- A free SSL certificate on every plan, reissued before it lapses
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
How much search traffic does a domain move usually cost?
Done properly, with page-level 301s, a change-of-address filing and updated links, expect a dip lasting a few weeks and then most of it back. Done as a blanket homepage redirect, expect to rebuild your deep rankings from nothing.
How long do I have to keep the old domain redirecting?
Years. Treat it as part of the plumbing. Links, bookmarks and citations out in the world decay very slowly, and every one of them keeps converting for as long as the redirect answers. Budget for renewing that old name indefinitely.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
Which control panel comes with the account?
cPanel, which the whole trade already knows. That means every tutorial online matches what you see, your backups restore onto any cPanel host anywhere, and what you learn here stays useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are stocked on specific plans for anyone who prefers them.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
Who actually runs the company?
Hosting Seller is a trading name of Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales — a real business with a public record and terms published under English law. Looking that up is worth doing about any host before you hand over your domain.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Read next
How to Clean Up the WordPress Database
Clear out years of accumulated junk and leave a database that answers faster — intermediate level, about 30 minutes.
How to Set Up MX Records
Send your domain's email to whichever mail service is meant to receive it — intermediate level, about 10 minutes plus propagation.
WordPress Hosting
WordPress looked after for you — LiteSpeed caching, staging copies and daily backups.
cPanel Reseller Hosting
The panel the trade already knows, sized for resellers, WHM in the box.
Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.
A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Whenever you're ready to order.
Every plan carries the essentials other hosts ring up as extras — and support that actually replies.
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