How to change the URL of the SharePoint Site

We have been thinking whether the URL of the SharePoint Site can be changeable or need to create a new web application and restore the content database on to the new web application.

You may not needed to stay hours to have the strategies planned for. We have a simple way for performing the same in SharePoint 2010. Hope this would also works for SharePoint 2007.

Objective here is to change the current site URL http://contosotest.contoso.com to http://contosodev.contoso.com.

To achieve this, we need to perform three tasks, which has been listed below.

1. Change Alternative Access mappings
   
   1. Go to Central administration.
      
   2. Click ‘Configure Alternative Access mappings’ under Application Management
      
   3. Select the web application which you wish to change the URL.
      
   4. Change the URL to http://contosodev.contoso.com
      
   5. Click OK
   
   
2. Change in IIS
   
   1. Go to Web site.
      
   2. Open up the bindings of the site (in IIS 7), change the host header details in case you are using IIS 6.0.
      
   3. Change the header name to contosodev.contoso.com
      
   4. Click OK
      
   5. Recycle the app pool which is being used by this site.
   
   
3. Change in DNS entries
   
   1. Open the DNS manager in the Domain server.
      
   2. Create a new DNS entry to point to contosodev.contoso.com
      
   3. Click Save.
   
   

By now, you are done with all the changes. Now you can go for IIS reset on the web server. This would refresh the cache in the web server and new URL is ready to access.

Try accessing http://contosodev.contoso.com and it starts working fine.

Other things to be considered:-

1. Ensure to change any hard coded URLs in the site (especially in the navigation)
   
2. Ensure to change any URLs pointed to old URL in the content query webparts or content editor webparts. Instead if you have used relative URLs in the site, no need to change anything.

After this, ensure to browse all the areas of the site to check for any broken links are there. If not there, you can have a happy hours.

This has been working without any hassles and you can understand that how easy it is. :)

Regards Gangadhar Kotu

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