Changing the WordPress URL

Posted by 9bit Studios on February 18, 2012 in Web Development, WordPress
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This post will teach you how to change the directory of your WordPress installation. Let’s say that your WordPress installation is stored at http://www.yourwebsite.com/wordpress and you want to change it to http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog. How would you go about doing that?

Changing the directory of your WordPress installation is actually a lot easier that one might first think. There is just one moment in the process where you might be sure that you have broken everything, but really it’s not a big deal. The creators of WordPress have done their best to ensure that it’s not too easy to completely destroy everything solely from the WordPress dashboard.

To change your WordPress install URL, follow the steps below…

  1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard
  2. Go to Settings and click on “General”
  3. Look for the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) fields. Your URL should be set at something like http://www.yourwebsite.com/wordpress (or whatever the URL is). It will vary depending on what you first installed your WordPress installation.
  4. Change both of these URLs to what you want your new URL to be, e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog
  5. Click on “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen.

Now this is the moment where you are probably sure you have broken everything because you will be taken to a page that says “Page not found” (or something similar depending on the browser). You can’t get to any of your pages and you cannot log in at http://www.yourwebsite.com/wordpress/wp-admin anymore.

Not to worry. All you have to do now is go to the folder (either on your FTP or in your web host’s dashboard file system) where your WordPress install was originally. In our hypothetical example for this tutorial, this would be the folder named “wordpress.” Rename this folder to “blog” (or whatever you set the URL to in step 4)

Now you can go to http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog and you will see all is as normal you can log in at http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/wp-admin and do all of the WordPress actions as normal just like you used to be able to, now under the new URL!