How I swapped my domain name
Below is the process I used to swap my blog’s domain name. I think/hope it’s all working. 🤞 This will be mundane to the seasoned vets, but perhaps it’ll help someone out who’s contemplating their own move.
Planning ahead
I highly recommend you sit down and make a step-by-step checklist before changing anything. Find all the relevant docs. Get a clear sense of how you’re going to redirect your old domain’s traffic to the new one. Remind yourself how to set up email with a custom domain. Once you’re fairly confident in your plan, get busy!
My process
- Update the new domain’s DNS records per the instructions in Bear Blog’s custom domain settings page.
- Set a timer for 20 minutes to let DNS propagate before I change any settings in Bear.
- Meanwhile, start setting up email for the new domain. I used iCloud+ and followed these docs.
- Once I had the email DNS records set, test email to the new address.
- Once testing is successful, update the email link in my Bear Blog footer.
- Test that new footer link, because typo paranoia.
- Configure email forwarding from the old domain’s address(es) to the new. I used Cloudflare’s email routing since I’m using Cloudflare as my registrar.
- Test that it works.
- This one took some time to get working. I think because I had to remove the old domains’ email-specific DNS records, and perhaps wait for that to propagate out. I also removed that domain from the iCloud+ config in the hope that it would help. The forwarding eventually started working after 30 minutes of messing around.
- Once the timer goes off, update the domain name in Bear Blog’s settings.
- Test that it works.
- Now that the new domain has taken over, the next step is time sensitive.
- Set up the redirect rules to get the old domain’s traffic heading to the new. Make sure the rules are “dynamic” so the URL path and query params will survive the redirect.
- Test that the rules work for the bare domain.
- Test that they work for a specific post’s URL.
- Test that they work the RSS feed URL. (I think this is working?)
- Note: While the redirect rules take effect very quickly, it took 20 minutes or so for my local DNS cache to flush before I could test them. I also had to re-add CNAME records in Cloudflare for the hostname root and my blog subdomain for the redirects to work. Cloudflare gave me a helpful warning about this when I was trying to save the rule config. After 30 minutes or so of stumbling around through this stuff, the redirects started working.
- Exhale.