How do I move WordPress from a subdirectory to the root directory?

You may also need to move the .htacess file to the www folder. If you’ve installed WP using Yahoo’s tools, redirecting the blog to the root directory may be an issue, because I don’t know if you have control of the .htaccess file. Yahoo has nice services, but it also restricts some of this functionality which you can readily do with another web host.

Hi Bob, Now replying to this post:

The warning is a Yahoo warning. What this means is that you can’t do what I’ve suggested in this post. Yahoo will show the HOME page from the root, but all other pages will show from the gold directory, and you can’t have them show from the root directory. Sorry.

Network Solutions connections to their MySQL servers are really slow, so are Go Daddy’s – so working in the WordPress Dashboard can be excruciatingly slow and tedious at times – and the page load times are very slow. I had to move clients off of both of them because of this. On Network Solutions, one site ended up going down several times in a few months because their shared hosting server was hacked at the root level. It was intensely time consuming and frustrating. The client lost all Google ranking as a result of being down for so long. Once we moved them to Blue Host, their ranking came back after a couple weeks, and the site loaded many times faster.

You might want to join the WordPress Group on LinkedIn. There was a great discussion about web hosts for WordPress. Some good hosts are: Host Gator, Dreamhost, Blue Host, and Host Monster. Blue Host and Host Monster are the same company out of Provo, Utah. They have great customer service, but I’ve had several sites down 3 or 4 times over the past several months. They had some power issues because Provo is off the grid and produces it’s own power. Host Gator is probably my current recommendation. With shared hosting, you just never know. I’m using Known Host for VPS, but that’s expensive compared to shared hosting.

Thanks, Doug! You’re welcome. Glad to spread the love.

Hi Neil,

Open the index.php file that is in that directory and check the content. If it’s “Silence is Golden” or starts with a PHP template tag to “get_header();” then you moved the wrong index.php to the root. Let me know what it says. The index.php file you want to move contains the following text:

< ?php
/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

You will want to completely remove your OLD site, because the browser may get confused between trying to load the index.php versus the index.html file.

I find it helpful to use an FTP application like Transmit (for Mac OS) or WS-FTP Pro (for PC) for file transfers because sometimes working in the web host’s file manager can be confusing.

Angela

Cool. Glad it all worked out! It seems saving the Permalinks is really more of a mandatory step, because the .htaccess mod rewrite needs to get updated.

Hi Danny,

It’s possible that the Contact Form plugin does not know how to reference itself in the sub-directory. You might need to check their documentation or try to uninstall and reinstall the plugin.

In terms of the changes on this post (moving WP to reference from the root directory), that would not cause slowness on the site unless perhaps, and I’m just making a wild guess, that a certain plugin is not working properly after this shift. You might try disabling any suspect plugins, like the Contact Form 7 and see if that resolves the slowness problem. Without knowing more about what your set up is, it’s hard for me to know what else to suggest.

Keep me posted!

Angela

Hi Danny,

I had the same experience at Network Solutions with my WordPress sites. The problem has something to do with the location of the database server and how WordPress must connect to that server to render the content. In this case, the best thing you can do is install a plugin called W3 Total Cache. This plugin will cache all the pages on the site as HTML pages. Everyone should run a caching plugin with WordPress especially if they are on shared hosting. You will want to go to the W3 Total Cache preferences and exclude your contact page from caching, otherwise if you have a captcha or anti-spam challenge, it won’t work. Please note that the W3 Total Cache does not show cached pages for logged in users. So, set the plugin, then open a different browser or log out and visit all the pages on the site to force the pages to cache. You should notice about a 700% improvement in performance.

Angela

Hi Michael,

Be sure all your pages are working fine first – click on your posts to be sure the permalinks with the new location are working fine. if not, you probably need to update your .htaccess file. This can be done be going to Permalinks and clicking Save Changes. If that doesn’t work you might want to open .htaccess in your FTP application and then delete the WordPress info there, and then go to Settings > Permalinks and Save Changes. This will rewrite the WordPress portion of the .htacess file. Let me know if that does the trick.

Hey, cool. I’ve found that I do sometimes need to clear the .htaccess to get it to rewrite. I’m not sure if it’s host dependent or what, but I should add that to my instructions above.

Hi Wanda,

After you have the website displaying from the root directory, you will still need to log in via the subdirectory, because the actual WordPress application files are still in the subdirectory. I’m not sure what’s going on with your visual editor — are you referring to the visual editor buttons? Do you have the Visual tab selected when you go to edit a post? You could try enabling the default theme and then re-enabling your current theme to see if that solves the problem.

Angela

Hi Andy,

Actually, you did it just fine. What you need to do now is make sure you set your General Settings correctly per the instructions in step 2 above. Then, you may need to delete the WordPress contents of your .htaccess file and go to Settings > Permalinks and click Save Changes. This will force a rewrite of your permalinks. Let me know if that works. The whole purpose of my writing this post is to help people avoid having to move the whole WP installation to the root directory, because that has it’s own issues and is a pain in the a**.

Angela

Thanks for the blow by blow of how you got your site to work. I’ll update this post as well. I have only had to move the .htaccess once, but I have found the need to delete its contents in order to get the permalinks to rewrite correctly. I’ve never had to delete and reinstall the theme. I would suggest that instead of having to delete and reinstall the theme, you might simply be able to activate the TwentyTen theme and then reactivate your own theme. If your theme caused problems, that would be highly unusual as the theme as nothing to do with the permalinks, but I have seen themes have problems and activating TwentyTen theme usually fixes these.