Changing Domain of your Drupal Website? Don't miss this article!

We all have our names with addresses where people can find us. Similarly, the websites we use have certain names along with their unique addresses, popularly known as their domain names. These domain names help users to find the website and the correct domain name saves your huge marketing costs. Because people remember your website with its domain name and a name that is relevant to your business, attractive, and easy to remember helps reduce domain name marketing effort and expense. 

A domain name is among the important facets of a website. To protect your brand online, you need to get trademarked your domain name so that nobody else can use the domain name of your business. If other people will start using the same name in a similar pattern as yours, what will happen? Of course, it will create confusion among users and will impact your business conversion. 

If your website is running on Drupal and you are considering changing the domain name of your website due to any marketing reasons, you must peruse this article to know more about the Drupal website domain name change. 

Why you change your Drupal website domain name? 

Website domain name change might be inevitable for you at times. And it is leaving you all confused and concerned about the lengthy process of changing the website domain name. But FYI, it is painless and easier work, which you can complete in a very short time. 

There are umpteen reasons due to which you change your website’s domain name such as some crucial marketing reasons, business and services expansion, or maybe to enter into the international market you need a name that will look more professional and catchier to overseas audiences. 

There are myriad websites that changed their domain name when needed, for example, PayPal was X.com, Twitter was twttr.com and the very popular Facebook was thefacebook.com. 

How to change your Drupal website domain name? 

First of all, choose a new relevant domain name that you wish to register for your website. A name that reflects your business precisely and which is unique and eye-catching. Also, decide the extension for the domain name. 

When you are about to transfer your website to the new domain name, don’t forget to check all the links of subpages included. Thereby, after changing the name and transferring the Drupal site, the important links won’t miss out. 

Create and compare a sitemap for your current and new domains. It will help you to make sure that all the 301 redirects are working properly. The 301 redirects are crucial for our web page robots scanning. Also, notify Google about the domain name change, so that the new changes won’t impact your ranking in SERPs. 

Furthermore, you might be using a lot of external marketing and analytical tools, their configuration is directly connected to your domain name. So, if you are changing the domain name, configuration settings will get changed for these external tools as well. If the external tools are using Google tag manager, creating a copy of the container you are using is a good idea, with the tool configuration for the new domain. Thereby, eventually, you only have to change the container ID and you are all sorted. Also, you will save many scripts and tools’ downtime because of configuration settings changes. You may seek the help of any custom Drupal development agency to help you with that. 

One more important factor is to inform all the DNS servers of the new domain name. It might take some time, which is alright. But it should be a properly defined, well-planned process for the smooth execution of a website with the new domain name. 

The real work starts from here with Drupal.. 

After all these contemplation and configuration settings, check the entire code of the Drupal website to find the old domain name because the old name requires to replace by a new one. Verify all the installed modules and update all the files that are responsible for these modules’ settings with the new domain name. 

In the case of multisite installation, the user’s files are located in the following directory  

olddomain.com/sites/olddomain.com/files 

You have to change the module configuration to the following to avoid any future navigation problems 

newdomain.com/sites/olddomain.com/files 

The traffic is very important. To redirect the traffic from the old domain to the new one, you should add an entry to .htaccess file, which is available in the root folder of the web page. The newly added code will redirect the traffic from the old domain to the new domain. 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>  

      RewriteEngine On 

      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdoma$ [OR] 

      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.staradomena.com$ 

      RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.nowadomena.com/$1 [R=301,L]  

</IfModule> 

Once you are done with redirects, start re-building the sitemaps. It can be done in different ways according to the module you are using for sitemap creation. If you are using an XML sitemap, you can easily perform this rebuilding task from the module’s configuration option. And as mentioned above, sitemaps are used by the robots scanning of the website, which directly influences the website visibility and search engine ranking. 

And finally, clear the Drupal cache. It is an added step that helps the website function smoothly. Cleaning cache can be done in many ways. One of the most popular ways is using the Drush cr command or a manual cleaning in the UI at admin/config/development/performance. 

You can also clone your Drupal website to the new domain name…. 

Create the new database 

New Drupal cloned site needs to have a new database as well. If you are using cPanel, click MySQL Databases from the databases section of the home page. And then create a new database, database username, and password. Check the settings in the new database so that no problem will arise in the future once the new domain will be live. 

Set the new database and domain details in setting.php file 

Now the new database and username, password is all set. So, you can replace the current Drupal site database settings with new cloned site database settings. For that, open the cloned site’s setting.php file with your text editor and replace the old database connections with the new ones. 

$databases['default']['default'] = array ( 

       'database' => 'drup177',  

       'username' => 'drup177', 

       'password' => '$password', 

       'prefix' => 'dr40_',  

       'host' => 'localhost',  

       'port' => '3306'

)