I've been setting up a website for a client and have got into a right mess!

The website was held with a company, over a decade ago, recently they went out of business (But were bought out by Plusnet - and supplied free hosting - result!) But the hosting was basic.

I set up a new wordpress site under new hosting, with Bluehost, using a temporary name until we were ready to go live. Yesterday I was asked to go live with the new design.

So I did two things at once - Transfered ownership of the domain name to a new owner, and at the new owner's side initiated the incoming transfer and also set new nameservers so once it arrived it would also be pointing to the new hosting.

For some reason the new site isn't loading on anything other than my mobile!? Two windows machines of mine, trying three browsers each, load the old site still. Yet my phone loaded the new one. And I asked family members to check on their computers and they have the new one too. But both myself and my client are only loading the old site.

EDIT - Now my phone is loading the old site again!

I spent an hour or so on chat with the hosts yesterday but they say they can see the new site fine too.

I can't access the site anywhere right now, if anyone sees a mistake I can't access wp-admin to change it! I did try a browser compatibility site and logged in to make a quick change on one page, but they are quite short sessions so I can't continue like that - and the client is asking me why they can't see their new website yet!

 

Any ideas?

The website is www.maisonbleue.co.uk - If you see a grey central column and a guy taking a wine bottle from the shelf then that's the old website - if you see a white design with a waitress laying a table then that's the new one. Please can anyone advise?

Are these just things that happen in the first 24 hours of a transfer? Can I advise her that it will all come to life when it's ready??

Thanks!

Edited October 17, 20205 yr by BenB

Hi Ben,

This could be related to DNS propagation and caching. As you have been looking at the website your devices will have cached the old DNS records, this could be cached by your devices, your local router, and your ISP too. When these caches expire, the new updated information will be retrieved, and you will see the new website too.

So, it is just really the first 24 hours this happens after making DNS changes - the time really is variable - but twenty-four hours is a good guideline.

You should find it all working by tomorrow - if you don't you should contact your host again.

For reference I do see the new site, so it does appear to be working :)

Thanks, that's encouraging! It had to happen as a weekend started didn't it! 

Give it until Monday and try again.

Phones are always a pain as their cache it retained for a long time.

I'm relieved to say that the new website did start working. I just had to be more patient!! It's a stressful time whenthe client is asking you why it's not working, when someone spots a dead link (Some images and links had absolute links to the old, temporary address) and I couldn't actually log in to fix them!

What I did manage to do while it wouldn't load for me was to use a browser compatibility site to log in (allbeit for only a few minutes at a time!) And I also found I could see the new site with a VPN, pretending I was elsewhere in the world, that showed me the new site too I realised!

You can make things easier in the future by temporarily changing the domain to point to the new DNS using the hosts file on your computer. This is what I do to check a site is functional before the DNS has even propagated.

Some info on how to do this https://support.acquia.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004175973-Using-an-etc-hosts-file-for-custom-domains-during-development

Nice! Wish I'd known that! Will refer to this thread if I do this again! 

Thanks