How to Change Your Primary Domain Name: A Step-by-Step Guide

To change your primary domain, you will need to update the domain associated with the root directory of your hosting account. If you have a Shared hosting plan with cPanel, VPS hosting, or Dedicated hosting account, Bluehost is available to assist you in changing your account's primary domain name.

This article will provide you with important information on how to change your primary domain name. Please review the following information before requesting a change.

• What You Should Know Before Renaming Your Account
• Renaming Your Account
• Summary

What You Should Know Before Renaming Your Account

Here are important considerations you need to know before changing your primary domain.

• The process can take up to 20 minutes to 5 hours, depending on the size of your account.
• Usernames, passwords, files, and databases will remain unchanged.
• However, we recommend backing up your websites and databases and then downloading them to your computer.
• To make the sites work after the rename, move the files for the new primary domain into the public_html directory. Move the files for the old primary domain to a subfolder within public_html. After the rename, you can assign the old domain to that subfolder.

  Please note that it is your responsibility to handle this, and it might cause some files or applications to break, requiring modifications to work with the new site location.

• The new primary domain must be pointed to the public_html directory itself, the same way the primary domain does currently.
• Forwarders on these domains will be deleted.
• Any custom DNS changes made to either of these domains will be lost and will need to be set up again. Cloudflare will also be deactivated on these domains.

  This will most likely only take a few minutes, but it could take up to a few hours.

• If you have logged into Weebly, the rename process will break the ability to publish a Weebly website on the old and new primary domains.
• Any addon services attached to the primary domain will no longer work after the change. These addons will need to be canceled and repurchased for the new domain. This includes, but is not limited to, SSL certificates, SiteLock, CodeGuard, etc.

Renaming Your Account

When you are ready to change your primary domain, please contact our Support team so we can assist you. Be sure to prepare the following information to expedite the request.

• Primary domain
• New primary domain
• Last four characters of the cPanel password
• Confirmation that you read and understand the account rename information. (e.g., "I have read and understand the account rename information, including my username will not change, and I have backed up my files/databases in case there is any data lost during the rename process.")

Get a new domain and protect your brand! Protect your brand by registering a variation of your current domain. Please visit https://www.bluehost.com/domains to check your domain's availability.

Summary

This article walks you through how to change the primary domain associated with your Bluehost hosting account. Before requesting this change, to which you are required to contact Bluehost Support, it is important to understand key considerations, such as backing up your data, potential file adjustments, and the impact on DNS settings, forwarders, and services like Cloudflare or Weebly. For a smoother experience, make sure to prepare your current and new primary domain names, along with your cPanel password.