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Want to change the domain name

Posted on August 16, 2017

How do I change the domain name on my website.

So currently my domain is aaa.com and I would like to change it to bbb.com - the rest of the site stays the same.

In addition - do I need to

  • Buy a new certificate for bbb.com
  • set up page level redirects or can this be done at domain level?

Thanks



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You will need to buy a new SSL certificate since those are issued at the domain level. Depending on your needs, you might want to just use LetsEncrypt. I use it for all my sites and have never had a problem (and it’s free!).

As for the redirects, your web server can handle that at the domain level. For example, in nginx you can do this in the aaa.com server block:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name aaa.com;
    rewrite      ^ https://bbb.com$request_uri? permanent;
}

If I remember correctly, this performs a redirect on the server side, rather than giving a 301 to the client. I’m not an Apache guy so I don’t know the syntax offhand, but I do know there’s a similar way to do the same thing.

Here’s a really good guide if you’re interested in the finer details: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-temporary-and-permanent-redirects-with-nginx

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