Best Practice for Moving Domain to Another Website
How Do I?
Hi there, I currently have a website on EE (theepiphanycenter.org). I have just a new website on a new hosting platform. I would like to use the domain I currently use for my EE site for my new website. However, I don’t want to lose access to my EE back end and all of its content yet. What is best practice for redirecting the existing domain to the new website while also ensuring I will be able to access the EE site content for at least another few months? I just want to make sure I’m making this transition as smoothly as possible. Thanks so much in advance for any directions you can provide here! -C
I suggest creating a subdomain on your new hosting account and move your EE site there.
Does your host allow you to add an alias or parked domain? That way, you can access the old site as you move content to the new one for a few months. Not sure why you would do that since usually if you migrate all the files and databases, all the content will be available on the new site already.
The procedure would usually be like this:
- Put the old site on maintance to avoid changes.
- Migrate all the files to new provider.
- Migrate the database to new provider.
- Test the new site, update paths, links, etc, if required.
- Change the DNS on the domain to point to the new server.
- Redirect all visitors to the old site to the new server.
You would normally do this at night, that way traffic on the morning will be on the new site.
Here is also some additional information:
https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/general/moving.html#moving-expressionengine-to-another-server