There are a number of reasons you may want to change your domain name.

For example your company may change it’s name, your may be re-branding, you may have forgotten to renew your domain and lost it, you may be building the site with a temporary domain name but for whatever reason, it can be edited once your site has been built.

Before you start always take a full backup of your WordPress site because things can go wrong so you need a point in time to restore back to.

Click Here for information about How to Backup your WordPress Site.

There are 3 options to do this change, you can edit the general settings of your site, edit the wp-config.php file or directly change your database. They are ordered in ascending order of difficulty.

Option 1: Edit General Settings

Within the WordPress Dashboard, Click Settings > General and you will see the WordPress Address(URL) and Site Address(URL).

To change the domain name, simply change the URLs in these two areas.

BE WARNED: As soon as you do this, your blogs address will be changed, if you do not have your domain configured correctly, you will not be able to login.

Option 2: Edit wp-config.php

The second way to change your domain name (and easiest to fix) is to set two new entries in your wp-config.php file.

Edit this file using the ftp client of your choosing and add the following two lines

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);

define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);

These entries correspond to the two URLs from method one.  Enter your new domain name and save the new wp-config.php. When you attempt to access the old domain you will be re-directed to the new one.  If you are having problems, simply remove these two lines and you will have access to your old domain.

Option 3: Edit The Database Directly

This one is a bit more advanced, but if you are happy editing your WordPress database with tools like phpmyadmin then this is another way to change your domain name

Navigate to your wp_options table, it may be called something like wp_options and find the two entries siteurl and home.

Edit these database entries with your new URL sand save them to the database.

Call 1-800-622-4403 option 2 and request Professional Services for Premium WordPress support.