Help Centre / Moving Your Site

What To Test Before You Point Your Domain

Updated 2 October 2026

Your copy is on its temporary address, something like site-1a2b3c4d.oxyforge.net, and your old host is still serving the public. This is the safest moment of the whole move, because everything you find now is private. Spend half an hour here and the DNS change becomes a non-event.

Work through these in order. The early ones catch the problems that make the later ones pointless.

Step 1: Click Through The Site As A Visitor

Open the temporary address in a private window. Visit the home page, then one of each kind of page you have: a normal page, a blog post, an archive listing, the contact page, and the search results.

You are looking for three things: a page that fails to load, a page that loads with no styling, and a page that loads with pieces of the old domain in it. Anything missing its styling usually means a file that did not copy.

Step 2: Check The Images

Scroll a page with a gallery and a page with a featured image. Missing images on a migrated site almost always mean the uploads folder did not finish copying.

Right-click an image that does work and copy its address. If it still points at your old domain, the stored URLs were not rewritten properly, so go back to the migration steps and run the search-replace again.

Step 3: Submit Every Form

Fill in your contact form and send it. Then check it actually arrived.

Form mail is the most common thing to break on launch day, because nobody looks at it until a customer complains. See transactional email explained for what a site here can send, and connect your own SMTP for making form mail reliable.

Step 4: Test The Shop End To End

If it is a WooCommerce site, place a real test order with a real card and refund it afterwards. Nothing else proves the chain works.

Check these as you go.

Payment gateways are worth extra care. Many of them hold a list of allowed domains or a webhook URL, and those still point at your old setup.

Step 5: Sign In To WordPress And Look Around

Use One Click Admin in the site’s page header. In the dashboard, check that your plugins are all active and none are reporting an error, and open a page in your page builder or editor to be sure the layout data survived the move.

If the editor shows a blank or broken layout while the front end looks fine, you have a serialised data problem from a raw SQL find-and-replace. That is fixable, but it means redoing the URL rewrite with wp search-replace.

Step 6: Remove What Belongs To The Old Host

Deactivate and delete the plugins that only made sense where you were:

• Caching plugins. The platform runs a full-page cache that clears itself when you publish, plus a Redis object cache. A caching plugin on top of that causes stale pages.
• Your old host’s own security, backup or performance plugin.
• Anything with your old host’s name on it.

See how caching works here for what is already running.

Step 7: Check The PHP Version

If you created the site on an older PHP version to match your old host, this is the moment to move it to 8.3 on the Tools tab and click through the site again. Doing it now, while the site is private, is far better than discovering an incompatible plugin next month.

Step 8: Check Two Switches

In WordPress, under Settings then Reading, make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked. Migration tools sometimes set it.

In the members area, check the Password Protect tab. If you put a password in front of the site while building, take it off at launch, or visitors get a password prompt instead of your home page.

Step 9: Check Your Permalinks

Compare a handful of real URLs from your old site against the same paths on the temporary address: old blog posts, old product pages, and any page you know gets traffic. The paths should match exactly.

If permalinks 404, open Settings then Permalinks in WordPress and save the page without changing anything. That rebuilds the rules.

Step 10: Then, And Only Then, Change DNS

When all of the above is clean, add your domain on the Domains tab and change the record it shows you. See connect a domain to your website and DNS records explained.

Leave your old host running for 72 hours afterwards. Visitors whose DNS has not refreshed keep reaching the old server, so nothing breaks while the change spreads.

If Something Goes Wrong After The Switch

Some visitors see the old site. That is normal for up to 72 hours. Their DNS has not refreshed. It resolves itself.

Mixed content warnings. A few resources are still being requested over http://. Run wp search-replace 'http://yourdomain' 'https://yourdomain' to clean up the stragglers.

The site feels slower than it did on the temporary address. The first visits to a new address are uncached while the page cache fills again. If it stays slow, read why is my site slow.

Something is wrong that only you can see. Open a ticket from the members area with the URL and what you expected.