So I’m more or less at the point where I’m ready to officially launch my friends site I’ve been making for him.
At this stage I have two main questions:
Firstly, he has an existing website with Wix. How do I go about moving his domain name from there to our new site at freecluster.eu?
Secondly, recently we set up Google Ads and analytics etc on this old Wix site. As a part of that we were given some custom codes to pop into Wix. These are applied to all pages. Can anyone advise me on how to move those to the new site?
If your friend has their own domain (e.g. example.com), the domain can be moved here like this:
If your friend is using a free subdomain from Wix (e.g. example.wixsite.net or whatever their customer site domain is), then it probably can’t be moved away from Wix.
That completely depends on how you built this new site. And how you’re planning to move content from Wix to here in the first place.
If Wix has some kind of HTML export feature which you can use to generate a copy of the site to upload here, then it should work out of the box here. If you need to migrate the content manually, then you’ll have to migrate those custom codes too. And how to add them depends on the website building system you choose.
Assuming you’re building the site in plain HTML, then yes. If you’re using a website builder or CMS of some kind, it may have tools to make this easier.
So it would appear shifting the domain bought from Wix for the old site to the new site isn’t as straightforward as it looked.
According to Wix: “Currently, it’s not possible to change name servers (edit NS records) for a Wix domain.
You can, however, point your Wix domain to an external site.”
You can find the IP address of your hosting account in the client area. If you point your domain name to that, it can work.
HOWEVER, the domain MUST be assigned to a hosting account first or it won’t show a website. And to add the domain name to a hosting account, the domain MUST point to the nameservers first.
So you can’t use a domain name here which is registered with Wix (or any other provider that doesn’t let you change nameservers - an extremely basic feature of any domain provider). Please consider transferring this domain name to a real domain provider, not a website making company who also sells domain names.
Thanks Admin, I’ve basically inherited this mess from my friend to sort out as I know marginally more about it than him, though that’s not saying much!
I’ll look at transferring this domain somehow, I get the feeling Wix won’t make this easy…
I take it I can transfer my existing domain bought through wix to these guys and point it to my free cluster.eu site in the way you’ve mentioned previously?
The only caveat is that with .com domains and some other extension you need to wait for 60 days after the registration or last transfer before you can transfer it again. Some domain extensions don’t have these restrictions, but then NameSilo may not offer them.
I would recommend IONOS for a short term domain you may not need to keep for long (2 years or under). If you plan to keep it for longer, namecheap works out better in the long run. Cloudflare also do cheap domains, and they are more transparent about the costs of the domain, but I would personally stick to namecheap or IONOS as they have easier to use interfaces. Namecheap support is significantly better then IONOS, with 24 7 live chat, I have had problems with IONOS in the past as they reply via email, and it can take like a day before I get a reply, frustrating when you need something fixed ASAP
Going to give Namecheap a go.
Just waiting for wix to change the IPS Tag so I can continue with the transfer…god knows how long that will take…they’ve already done their best to send me round in circles with various people.
Just checked in with Namecheap customer support, tags are sorted and transfer is happening. They’ll email me when it’s all done. Lovely service from Namecheap so far!
Congrats for moving away from Wix! HTML & CSS is better because you have more functionality and features! Second good choice going for NameCheap. I personally register my domains there!
