Changing The URL Of Your WordPress Site

WordPress web site owners often come to realize that they want to change the URL of their web site, whether it is because they want the site to be accessible from the root folder (without using a redirect) or because they want to change the domain name of the web site.

If you’d like to do this, first ask yourself if you feel comfortable editing the code in your theme files, and if you feel comfortable using FTP to upload the edits to your web server. Remember to use a plain-text editor to make all of your edits, not a word processing program like MS Word. If you can do those things without hesitation, you’ve made it over the first hurdle.

The next thing you have to do is decide whether you are going to make the domain name point to your WordPress folder or if you are going to copy the site files from your WordPress folder to the folder that the domain name points to.

• If the domain name is changing, you can often point the new domain name to the WordPress folder when you add it in your hosting control panel, and not have to copy or move any files at all.
• If the domain name is not changing but the path to the site is (e.g. moving WordPress to the root folder), and/or you don’t know how to point your domain to a specific folder at the hosting level, you can simply copy all of your WordPress site files via FTP to the folder that the domain name points to.

Two things to do before you upload your site files

Check the .htaccess file in the WordPress folder: WordPress usually writes entries to a .htaccess file in the main WordPress folder. If you are moving the site from a sub-folder to the root or vice-versa, you will have to edit this file. If your site is in a sub-folder called /blog, the .htaccess file in your WordPress folder will contain these lines:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If your site is going to be in the root folder, the references to the sub-folder need to be removed, making it look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Add two lines of code to the functions.php file of the Default theme: As shown in the WordPress Codex article Changing The Site URL, you can add these two lines of code to the top of your functions.php file to tell the database the new site URL:

define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');

Replace example.com with your actual domain name and any sub-folder name that points to your site. The only reason I suggest doing this to the functions.php of the Default theme is so that you don’t have to mess with your active theme’s files. If you prefer to edit the functions.php of your active theme, that will work too. It is advisable to make backups of your functions.php file and your WordPress database at this time.

If you have chosen to edit the functions.php of the Default theme and that is not your active theme, go to your site’s admin at the old URL and activate the Default theme. If you edited the functions.php of your active theme, you can skip this step.

Now that you’ve done your edits, you can upload all of the necessary files to the proper folder. If the folder is not changing, you only need to upload the new functions.php, and possibly the new .htaccess file. If you are changing the folder, upload the entire site to the new folder.

Now simply go to your site at the new URL. It should work. Assuming it works fine, you can upload the backup version of the functions.php (i.e. one that has not been edited). It is important to remove those extra lines of code. Your site is now ready to go.

Additional considerations:

• If you are using a plugin that references a file in your folder structure such as the Google XML Sitemap Generator or a database backup utility, you may need to change the path in the plugin’s settings to the new path.
• You may also need to change the path to your uploads folder in Settings > Miscellaneous
• You may want to use the Broken Link Checker plugin to make sure that you don’t have any broken internal links or redirects in your site caused by the URL change.
• If you feel brave and have a lot of internal links that need to be changed, you can use the Search and Replace plugin to change them all simultaneously.
• If you have moved your WordPress site to a new folder on the server, remember to delete the old files.
• If you have changed your domain name remember to put in a .htaccess 301 redirect from the old location to the new one.
• It is advisable to put a robots.txt file in your root folder so that search engines will crawl and re-index the site. Google may reject your sitemap if you don’t have a robots.txt file giving them access to crawl the site.

If this seems too difficult for you, you may be interested in my article on Accessing Your WordPress Site From The Root Folder, which explains how a simple .htaccess redirect file can point requests from your root URL to your WordPress folder.

Have fun!

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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