Last month we mention that we were going to change our websites domain name from my-doodads to mydoodads. However, as things did not go well! We’re so pleased you managed to find us again. So we are going to document our experiences, to help you avoid our mistakes.
For a bit of background, our website has been running for around 10 years, and in that time it has gone through multiple revisions. These revisions include switching Content Management Systems, from Drupal to WordPress, and making or using numerous themes. So our website has always been a bit, “make it up as we go”.
While we think that the site is now generally in a good place, and we are happy with its design and the quality of its content. There was one issue that has been bugging us for a very long time. When we originally built our website, the domain name mydoodads.com was already taken. So we had to compromise and use my-doodads.com.
However a couple of years ago, the mydoodads.com domain name became free. So we bought it and simply created a forward, so that both my-doodads.com and mydoodads.com would resolve to our site.
The problem with this setup is that our branding became a little confused, and it’s basically bad practice to have two domain names linking to the same content. So in February we made the decision to move our site to mydoodads.com and then decommission my-doodads.com.
Changing Domain names is not easy
As our site is hosted in Germany by a company called IONOS. Everything started well, as we switched to mydoodads.com as our primary domain name. Then within minutes DNS servers across the world were correctly resolving our new domain name to our website. We also noticed that the SSL certificate that our web hosts include with each domain, correctly changed.
Next we disassociated the my-doodads.com domain from all DNS servers, by resetting the domain name to its default settings. Then because we had done some research into how you change the domain name on a WordPress website. We proceeded to sign in to WordPress, and in Settings – General, rename the WordPress address and Site address fields to match our new domain name.
This automatically adjusted all the links to our posts, so that as you navigate through the site, you are sent to the correct page. However within each of our posts, any links to posts using my-doodads.com, had to be manually changed. Which with 500 posts is something that we still have not finished.
Yes we could have created a query in our SQL data base that would replace my-doodads with mydoodads. But as we would have had no control over these automated changes, we decided that it was safer to manually review each post and correct any links we found.
WordPress redirect issue
We then tested our site, to make sure that it would load in various browsers, which is where things started to go wrong. While Safari, Edge, and Chrome all loaded without issue. Firefox would redirect us to a holding page on our server that used my-doodads.com.
As it turns out Firefox was the only browser that was behaving according to internet standards. This meant that while the other browsers were directing us to our website when we used mydoodads.com. These browsers should have, (like Firefox) been redirecting us to a my-doodads.com holding page.
The reason this is important, is that both Google Search and Adsense, adhere to internet standards. So suddenly we found that our website was not being crawled or authorised to show adverts. Which is a major problem, as no one was visiting our website.
After a lot of research and head scratching, we discovered that we also had to make changes or check the wp-config.php file in our WordPress build. We then had to update wp_options in our SQL database, by manually changing the ‘siteurl‘ and ‘home‘ fields. Before finally and most importantly editing the .htaccess file in WordPress to stop a redirect to the old domain name.
Google Serach and AdSense
While this all seems obvious now, at the time it took us days to work out. Which in turn caused all sorts of issues for both Google Search and Google AdSense. So because it can take up to 6 weeks to validate a website with Google, and Google may not have seen the changes we have made. We are still waiting for Google to validate our site.
The good news is that Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo have all re-crawled our website, and are correctly displaying our content in their search results. However, the problem with these search engines is that not that many people use them. So for the last couple of weeks the website has only received a couple of visits.
So what did we learn from all this? Firstly, make sure you get your branding right before you start building a website. However if that’s not possible, think very carefully about changing a domain name.
Looking back at the experience, perhaps we should have rebuilt the whole site, and hosted it on a new server. Then after associating our mydoodads.com domain with our new site, run both sites in parallel until Google search and Adsense were working. We could then switch off the old site, leaving only the new site with the domain name we wanted to use.
Early Access content
As we have been focusing on making videos for our series “A beginners Guide to setting up a Synology NAS”. Due to longer run times and the general complexity of the topics we are discussing, our video output has dropped. However starting this month we will be posting a number of new videos, for our site members.
You may have noticed that we posted a video on how you factory reset an Xbox Series X or S. This was along with a video demonstrating how you install, and configure Video Station on a Synology NAS. So this month, we will be releasing two additional videos to early access.
On our Synology NAS, we like to use paid SSL certificates rather than OpenSSL certificates. However as paid SSL certificates will need to be manually renewed every year. We often forget what the process is in order to renew our certificates. So we decided to make a video to act as an aid to memoire, along with some reference notes.
For the second video of the month, as we are turning our Synology NAS into a media server, we want to be able to stream video. So we have created a comprehensive video which demonstrates how you install and configure Video Station.
This months content
A number of years ago we decided that the way we access network shares in macOS was not particularly user friendly. So we decided to create an Apple script to simplify the process, and make it clearer as to what our computer was doing. Then because Apple scripts can be turned into an application, we decided to make a video that demonstrates the whole process of making an Apple script, turning it into an application and then using it to connect to our Synology NAS.
The second video we will be releasing will be the next video in our beginners guide to setting up a Synology NAS. So because we are now looking to turn our NAS into a media server, we will be looking at installing and configuring Audio Station.
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