Moving a Web Site to a New Server

Sometimes you will find it necessary to move a Web site from one server to another. Perhaps you are moving a departmental site from a local area network to a central server, maybe your departmental server is being replaced, or maybe you are leaving UA and need to take your personal Web site with you. In any case, follow these steps to make your move as easy as possible:

  1. Copy the files that make up your Web site to the new site.
  2. Advertise your new location.
  3. Redirect viewers from your old site to your new one.

Copy Your Files

The first thing to do is actually copy the site. This isn't very difficult, but there are some things to keep in mind. First, don't erase anything from the current site. At this point you don't know how long it will take to finish your move, and you don't want to break anything in the meantime. Second, you need to make sure you know how your new server is set up. Where do your files go? Do you need to have a different name for your home page? If you are using server-side includes or CGI, are they available?

When you are ready to copy your files, decide how you want to do it. If you have been building your site on a personal computer and publishing them to the remote site, it is very easy to change the publishing location and upload to the new server. If you build directly on the server, you should look into what FTP options are available. Many times you can use command-line FTP to move between two remote machines. You can also use an FTP client to move the Web site from your current server to a personal computer, then up to the new server.

Next, test your site thoroughly! Look at all of your links and pictures. Make sure none of them are still pointing to your old server. If you have always used relative links, there should be very few problems, but if you built directly on the server, use CGI and SSI to build pages, or otherwise used absolute linking, you will have to change them now. Also, if you had to change the name of your home page, you have to change all of your links to the home page as well. This part of the process is extremely important; don't be embarassed later by a broken page!

Advertise Your New Location

There should be some overlap between the time you finish your new site and when you take down your old one if at all possible. Use this time to advertise your new site. Go through any promotional or informational materials and determine which ones will need reprinting with the new Web address. Change any e-mail signatures that refer to the old site. Put a notice on the old site that you are in the process of moving. The amount of advertising you need to do depends on the audience of your site; the important thing is to surprise as few users as possible when the site moves.

Another thing you may want to do is look at your internal pages. Those that are getting linked to directly from other sites may need special attention later. At this point, notify anyone that you know is linking to you of the upcoming move so that they can go ahead and change their pages.

Redirect From Your Old Site to Your New One

Once you are satisfied that your new site is working properly and you've notified everyone you need to of the new site's location, you can start getting rid of the old one.

First, replace your old home page with a "we've moved" page. This page will accomplish two things: it will let people know your new address, and it will take people with newer browsers to the new site.

For those older browsers that do not support redirection, you should include some text on the page that tells where your new location is and that viewers should be redirected automatically. Make sure that you include a link to the new site.

Redirection is accomplished by a META tag in the Web page's header. You can consult the documentation for your Web editor, but it may be easier to:

  1. Open the Web page in some editor that will let you view and change the HTML code. If all else fails, use a plain text editor like Notepad.
  2. Find the tag that looks like this: <HEAD>
  3. Immediately after this tag (you can go to the next line if you want), type
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="
  4. Next, decide how many seconds you want to wait on this page before the redirect occurs. Do not put zero! Three or five are popular choices. Type the numeral followed by a semi-colon immediately after the quotes. For example, to wait three seconds, your tag should look like:
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;
  5. Now you just need to know the address of your new Web site. Add the word URL followed by an equals sign and your new Web address after the semi-colon (no spaces!). You must include the http:// part of the address! Then finish off the quotes and put an ending bracket. To redirect to the HelpDesk site after three seconds, I would have the tag:
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;URL=http://helpdesk.ua.edu">
    (This should all be on the same line.)
  6. Save your file, exit, and publish as normal.

Now that you have your home page redirected, you need to deal with the other pages in the old site. You don't want people to find pages that you are no longer maintaining. You can probably delete most of your internal pages. However, those that you indentified earlier as being linked to by outside pages should be replaced with a redirect page as well. Don't leave old content lying around. It will be found through search engines and old external links.