Appreciate your valuable time reading this. Hoping someone with real expertise and previous expereince will be able provide me tips (do's and don'ts)/point me to the right direction. My Requirement: I have a wordpress site with a domain name inspirationsunlimited.co.in hosted on GoDaddy; I've decided to move the site to a new host "HostGator" and site will have new TLD as .in (instead co.in the url will be inspirationsunlimited.in) Objectives to Achieve:This where I need your expert advise. 1. I want to shift the site smoothly, with same file, folder, database, url structure etc. 2. I read http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress; just want to make sure if there is any other alternative and easy way. 3. I also want to redirect few individual article urls to new domain (many of the links are indexed by search engines) apart from old domain name to new domain name . Please remember I will not be keeping GoDaddy server once the transfer is done. Thank you again and will look forward for your expert advice.
You can move all of the content by using the import feature, but you cannot retain any URL structure, links or anything else if you put the site on a new domain and by changing extensions, it's a completely new domain. It's that simple.
hmansfield is right. PLUS.... if any of the pages are indexed in the search engines, you would also need to create 301 redirects for all of the indexed pages to point at the new "corresponding" page. If you don't do this, then your old pages will be indexed and then the SE's will craw the new pages and not associate them with the old site and frown upon them because it will look like duplicate content. It's not hard to set them up but if you have a lot of pages indexed in google, it can be very tedious and annoying.
You can keep all of it with a redirection plugin fine. Contact me at http://www.geekforhim.com/portfolio if you need some help
Ask hotgator support to migrate the site for you, they will do it for free in the first thirty days of your hosting account.
Appreciate for going through the post and providing much needed infos. I feel I should be able to move the site myself. Moreover I want to give a try, found a video tutorial http://educhalk.org/blog/how-to-move-wordpress-to-a-different-server-and-web-address/, hope this should help. Yes, I am aware of HostGator support migrates site, however I want to do it myself, so that I can learn and I can move my other site as well. I am more concerned on the 3rd point, I know i have to redirect the old urls (not many), I want to know the exact code and how, where and what to do.
there is a place in cpanel to do redirects manually (good to know how) if you navigate to "Sites" section then you will see icon for "redirects".... OR you could use the wordpress plugin like someone else above mentioned. Personally, I like to know that the redirects are in place from my own cpanel instead of using the plugin... but I'm weird like that. Plugins are great and help a lot but this is something I always preferred myself. I also have a video or two lying around that shows how to move a site from one host to another, if you'd like to watch it. Plus, here is a little literature on the moving process http://support.hostgator.com/articl...-wordpress-blog-from-one-host-to-another-host