Changing your WordPress Domain Name

This guide will explain how to change WordPress site's primary domain. We have added some useful tools inside the Nimbus Hosting platform to help with renaming WordPress sites but there are also a number of things you'll need to watch out for when renaming your WordPress site.

Steps

1. From the Server Dashboard click on the website you want to change the domain on.

2. On the website dashboard click the pencil icon next to the primary domain to edit.

3. Enter the new domain and then click "Confirm".

Note: The Nimbus Hosting platform will change the primary domain name in your sites database and perform a find and replace of the old URL replacing it with the new one.

4. That's it you are done, you should be able to now browse the site on the new domain name. Should this not have worked as desired please see the further steps detailed below.

Note: You will now need to update the DNS to make sure the new domain is pointing to the server. We have a guide for updating your DNS settings here.

Post rename checks

There's a few things going on under the hood when you rename a WordPress site using our platform. Here are some things to check if you are having problems with the site loading after you have renamed it.

• Check the URL in the database - We use a program called WP-CLI to change the domain name in your sites database. However if there is a plug-in or theme issue on the site it can stop WP-CLI from working. Therefore if you are having trouble with the site redirecting back to the old domain it's worth checking the domain in the wp-options table as below:

• Check the sites SSL certificate - Before you renamed the site you may have had an SSL certificate installed on it for the old domain name. In order to utilise HTTPS on the site once again you'll need to make sure that you re-enable LetsEncrypt for the new domain.
  

A handy tool you can use to check the current SSL status for the site is our own SSL checker which can be found here.

• Check the .htaccess and wp-config.php and other core WordPress files for references to the old domain name.