Today we are going to learn how to move your WordPress Blog to a new domain. Changing your WordPress installation to a brand new domain is not the easiest of tasks. Unlike a standard website, the URL of your website is hard coded into your WordPress installation, meaning that even if you did copy the files from your WordPress install to a new domain, it would always point straight back at the old domain.

What we will be covering over the course of about three articles which will be produced over the course of this week is a strategic method in which to change your WordPress installation over to a new domain, whilst minimizing the impact that this has on your SEO, and your Google rankings. Part one, which we are seeing today, will cover how to change your WordPress blog to a new domain.

For a blogger, this is quite a scary thing to even attempt. Speaking from my own experience, at the moment, I am currently changing a sister site of Top WordPress Themes over to a new domain giving it a dot com rather than a dot info. The problem with this is that the dot com has no Alexa ranking, and it is not listed in Google at all yet, so the implications of doing this can be very severe. If not done right, I could lose income from Advertising, I could have trouble getting my Google rankings back, and much worse.

In this part, we will be covering the aspect of moving your WordPress files to a brand new domain and making those files work. This involves a few steps which may not entirely make sense until I go into further detail in the next parts to this article, but I do stress, there is a method in this madness, this is what works for me. I am sure that there are many other methods out there, and in part, this is why we have comments on this site enabled, so you can too share from your experience what has and hasn’t worked for you.

First thing that you are going to need to do is deny robots from accessing your new domain so early, as this could affect your search engine rankings. Create a new file on your new domain called robots.txt and include the following lines of text in this file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Now you are going to need to back up all of your files on your current installation on your current domain. This will include your SQL database and your files. Depending on what you have installed on your server, this may be as simple as downloading a backup from your c-panel, or downloading everything via ftp. Once you have everything backed up, upload your WordPress files to your public_html or root on your new domain, and make sure to set all of the same permissions as you had on your existing installation.

Depending on what you have installed on your hosting, or how your SQL is set up, this part may be a little tricky. You need to restore your SQL from the old domain on the new domain. In C-Panel and Direct Admin, this is as simple as creating a new SQL database (this will create a SQL table with the right prefix) then restore your backup on to the new SQL database. If you haven’t done so already, add your user, and then include these details in your wp_config.php file. This will tell your WordPress installation where the database is now located, so that it is not looking for the old installation anymore.

Whilst you have the wp_config.php file still open, we are going to fix that little problem of your WordPress install directing to the old domain. This is a surprisingly easy task. Simply add the following lines in your config file:

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://www.example.com’);

define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://www.example.com’);

You should now notice that if you navigate to your WordPress on your new domain, it should be working 100%. That is how simple it is, not as complex as it is made to sound. The only thing that needs to be fixed now is changing any links that you have created over the course of your blog being live that direct to the old domain. This is also a very simple fix. Download the Search and Replace plugin, and using this plug in, you can easily replace any references to your old URL with the new URL.

And that is it! That is how to move your WordPress blog to a new domain. Now, let’s not forget that there is a much more important aspect to this, and that is how to redirect from your old domain to the new domain without affecting your search engine rankings, and we will cover this over the next few days in more detail, including what we are going to do with that robots.txt file.

Again, if you have anything to add on this matter, please don’t be scared to use the comments!

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This WordPress Theme is compatible with the new WordPress 2.8 and of course, backward compatible. Coming with threaded comments and a couple of other useful settings and tested on major web browsers. Two adsense slots included. Surely you can replace them with any ad pictures or code texts.

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Change log

V1.0.1 WordPress Theme includes:

• WP Page template included
• Top navigation revamped (now it work with your pages list)
• Blogroll links

Installation and Configuration

It really doesn’t get much easier than this to install this Free WordPress Theme, extract the contents and upload the whole ‘theme’ folder to your wp-content/theme directory, and you can name it whatever you like. Copy all plugin(s) into wp-content/plugins directory and active them via WordPress admin.

1) Add a page content – Log into WordPress admin, Write > Page, hit the save and publish and this will reflect on the top navigation menu.

2) Change the del.icio.us Feed – Edit left.php, line #24:
src="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/js/yichi?count=8&sort=date”
replace yichi with your own delicious id, count=8 where you can change how many items you like to show.

3) Change the number of display posts in home – simply go wp admin, settings > reading > Blog pages show at most: where enter the number (the default value is 10)

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Some guide you might need before using this theme:

Using Custom Field to custmize the post style

As Infinity theme requires to use the feature of WordPress custom filed, here I will show you how to enable that magazine cover style by simple add key value to custom filed:

1) Once you’re about finishing your post and BEFORE you press ‘publish’ button, scroll down your page to Custom field, where you can enter a new keyword and value

Key: thumbnail
Value: enter your photo path
(you can either upload a image and copy its path directly or link to your flickr album. And for a better result, please sizing your photo to 235*150 pixels), then hit ‘Add Custom Field’ button, wordpress will save this field, and you can edit it at later. It’s that easy!

2) then publish it and go check the update you’ve just made, if everything goes fine, your frontpage will show thumbnail style covers.

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P2 is a micro blogging theme inspired by Twitter and Facebook. It lets the user leave live notifications or comments on the fly right from the homepage updated in real time. It’s perfect for ongoing working groups, remote teams or even for keeping up to date with your latest family news.

Some of the features:

• Threaded comment display on the front page.
• In-line editing for posts and comments.
• You can post from the front page.
• RSS feeds in place for each author, each tag, and any search.
• Live tag suggestion.
• You can show/hide comments.
• Real-time notifications when a new comment or update is posted.
• On the sidebar featured your Recent Comments and latest tags with their own RSS feed.
• You can easily embed videos.
• You can make post Private going under under Settings > Privacy.
• Gravatars ready.

A short video to explain more about this amazing wordpress theme.

You can see a demo of this WordPress theme in action here

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