Checklist for moving a site from non-www to www?
-
Hey all,
I’m looking to move a site from non-www to www and was wondering if anyone knows of a list of things to check and update after making the switch in WordPress (i.e. updating preferred domain in GSC).
Anyone ever done this before who can lend some advice?
Thanks!
Dan
-
Will this be on the same domain? If yes then:
- make sure you verified all properties in GSC: www and non www of your domain
- fetch all links from Google search results with some tools like scrapebox
- scan entire website page by page and make a list of all pages/posts/etc (you'll need them later)
- go to wp dashboard - settings - general and change there from non www to www wp address url and site address url (probably you have to login again after)
- empty cache if you have cache
- scan again your entire website and check if there're links pointing to non www version of your domain (probably will be redirected automatically but save this list)
- correct them - in most cases they were manually added
- combine lists of links: from Google and from your scan; remove duplicates; make sure all are non www
- do 301 test with tool like scraming frog to see if all non www pages are redirected with 301 to www pages without errrors
- combined list of links sent to reindex to speed up the process - you need some indexing software or service
- no need to set preferred domain but if you wish?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Setting up redirects from non wordpress
Hi, we are rebuilding our site which was built on WordPress. The old permalink structure was /%post_id%/%postname%/ The new site is a custom build (not Wordpress), however, we are using WordPress for blog posts. The URL structure is www.customewebsite/blog/ As the custom site is not WordPress, we do not know how to create a redirect to push the WordPress url /%post_id%/ to the /blog section of the new site. What we currently get is page not found. Can anyone help with the htaccess redirect code? Many thanks one and all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Site Migration of 4 sites into 1?
Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though? Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Why Did My Site Go Limp On Me?
One of my clients was once in the #1 position for "Philadelphia interior designer" and other related terms, but her site has dropped significantly. Still it is on the first page, but far from its former glory. http://www.interiorsbydonnahoffman.com is the site. What really confuses me is why in her home turf search of "Bucks County Interior Designer" a competitor, http://www.miriamansellinteriors.com, is above her in the SERPS. According to OSE her competitor has a PA of 32 vs my client's 39. My client has 35 Linking Root Domains (and some of high quality) compared to just 11 for the competition. In all aspects her competitor looks weaker and less relevant to me. Her site has been weak in the SERPs since May/June. We are redesigning her site- she has a high bounce rate compared to my other interior design clients, something like 55%. Any insights from y'all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfhytrwy0 -
Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
Hi Mozzers - We are about to move one of our sites to Joomla. This is one of our main sites and it receives about 40 million visits a month, so the dev team is a little concerned about how the new site will handle the load. Dev's solution, since we control about 2/3 of that traffic through our own internal email and cross promotions, is to launch the new site and not take down the old site. They would leave the old site on its current URL and make the new site something like new.sub.site.com. Traffic we control would continue to the old site, traffic that we detect as new would be re-directed to the new site. Over time (the think about 3-4 months) they would shift the traffic all to the new site, then eventually change the URL of the new site to be the URL of the old site and be done. So this seems to be at the outset a duplicate content (whole site) issue to start with. I think the best course of action is try to preserve all SEO value on the old URL since the new URL will eventually go away and become the old URL. I could consider on the new site no-crawl/no-index tags temporarily while both sites exist, but would that be risky since that site will eventually need to take those tags off and become the only site? Rel=canonical temporarily from the new site to the old site also seems like it might not be the best answer. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Development site crawled
We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled. We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Seo flash site
Hey. Would hear whether it is possible to SEO a website which is flash site cms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agger0 -
Site Transfer and Downtime
If I want to transfer my website from yahoo to another web host without having any down time how would I do that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Were small sites hit by Panda?
It seems that primarily large sites were hit by Panda, but does any one know of / own a small site that was hit by Panda?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0