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Years ago, I got my own domain with the intent of creating a website, say 1my-domain.com1 but instead ended up making a website for someone else as a subdomain (other-domain.org). I created the site on the subdomain as a WordPress site, but now I've re-designed it to be a custom site without WordPress AND I want to move it to a new web host.

The redesigned site is currently just a sub-folder of my domain, like my-domain.com/re-do/. Not quite ready for publication due to the need for some content, but very close to done.

When this site is moved from hostA to hostB, there should be no change for visitors to just navigate to other-domain.org as usual. Once they get there, the site will look much the same as the WordPress site, but without a login or comments, etc., or the bloat that comes with WordPress.

I have read about having to do redirects, update .htaccess and robots.txt files and checking internal links. I don't yet understand how it all works.

I have an robots.txt file in my own domain root folder that just disallows several bots, which I think I should keep as is in the new domain.

Then I have a bunch of .htaccess files in various places of other-domain.org that have been created and modified by WordPress and its plugins, which I suspect will be irrelevant in the new setup.

And I have checked all my internal links for the redesigned site.

So far, I think I'm OK. But the redirects are confusing. If the redesigned site on the new host is found by navigating to the same exact address as the WordPress site, is there a need for redirection? If so, just how do I go about it? I understand that it might need to be a 301 redirect created on the new host's CPanel, but I don't know how to actually do it. My current host is not willing to assist me in this, by the way (another reason to move to a new host). And will it be necessary? This amateur needs some guidance!

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Your question is a bit unclear, but if the crux of it is

If the redesigned site on the new host is found by navigating to the same exact address as the WordPress site, is there a need for redirection?

Then, provided all the pages retain the identical URL's (ie https://...../xxx ) as they had prior to the shift there is no point in doing redirection - and not really any practical way to do so either.

If some of the URL's are different you will want to do 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. There are lots of ways to do this - probably the most standard is by editing the .htaccess for the site and adding redirect lines to it like

Redirect 301 /original.html https://canonical.site/new-url.html
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  • After considerable reading on the matter, I found that your answer was indeed correct. I didn't want to accept the answer, because it means adding about 80 lines to an .htaccess file, which is a little scary. But apparently necessary. Commented Feb 12 at 15:55
  • @tom_m, if you have a pattern or scheme, you can reduce the number of rules using patterns. Commented Feb 13 at 5:25

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