Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help

[isle_surf]

I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice.

This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer.

That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above:

“The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there?

If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages?

Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to  http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages?

Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work."

Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.

[ClaudioSouza]

Well, I'm an amateur in these matters but what I reaalu now is that .htacess files works and works fine

I'd advice you to may a small contract (6 months) and migrate your "old site" into thre, do the best pratices and get youy victory.

This is what I would do in your toes

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Marc!

Is the old site a WordPress install? Can you just use the Redirect Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/?

[kwoolf]

Hi Mark,

I do suggest moving to a provider like DigitalOcean that offers great hardware that costs less than some shared hosting solutions. With DO, you have complete control. I wouldn't suggest PHP redirects with Wordpress extensions unless you absolutely must. I moved to Nginx years ago, but with Apache I know you can still have an .htaccess file in your website home directory, and rewrites should work these just fine.