Prior to today, if you wanted to change the primary domain of a site you had to create a new site in SpinupWP then manually copy files, update configurations, and run find and replace operations. It was painful and you, our customers, told us as much.

Today this pain disappears.

Changing the primary domain of a site in SpinupWP is now as easy as updating the domain in the site settings and clicking Save!

When you change the primary domain, SpinupWP will rename a bunch of files and folders on your server, run find and replace operations against files and your site’s database, and verify the configuration before flipping the switch. If verification fails, it rolls everything back so that your old domain continues to function while you figure out what went wrong. For a full list of all the operations performed when you change the primary domain of a site, see our documentation.

After changing the primary domain we recommend you test your site thoroughly and check any Nginx config files you might have added or customized. Also, please be aware that changing the primary domain can negatively impact SEO if the old domain is not redirected properly. Changing the primary domain will result in a short period (~1 min) of downtime while SpinupWP moves config files around, generates new HTTPS certificates and restarts Nginx and PHP-FPM.

Changing the primary domain of a site is actually a prerequisite of some of the other features on our roadmap, including site cloning and temporary domains.