Moving WordPress to you Root
Posted by Lindsayanng on February 15th, 2009
So you want to move your wordpress blog to your root folder? Or maybe you just clicked on this because you wanted to see whats the point of doing this.
If you don’t already know this, your “root” is the public_html directory, or the main page of your site. This is the directory that users will land on if they type in your domain. If you have a web page in there called index, then they will automatically see that, otherwise they will not see anything. It is the very TOP directory for your website pages.
Well, if you are wondering WHY, then read this post here about splash pages and the root directory.
First, know that you should not do this if you already have a home page that you do not want to loose. If you have multiple sections to your site; for example a blog, portfolio, and a store, you will not want to move your blog to the root because you will overwrite your home page. If you do not have anything there, then you are free to go ahead. You should also be aware that wordpress has it’s own .htaccess, and if you made changes to one in your root, the wordpress one will overwrite it. It is a good idea to just download a copy of the .htaccess that is in your root folder to your desktop.
So the first thing you need to do is log in to your admin and go to settings and then click on general.
While you are there, you will see a place to change your wordpress address (URI) and blog address (URI). You will want to now make both of those say your domain name. So it would be like “yourdomain.com” with no ‘/’ or anything after the .com. Then make sure you click UPDATE OPTIONS.
Just be aware that if you try to view your blog now, you will get broken pages. This is because even though you told wordpress to look for your blog in the root, you have not yet moved it to the root.
So now what you need to do is open your FTP program. I prefer FETCH for mac users, and CuteFTP for pc users, although you can also use FileZilla which is free. Click here to learn how to set up FileZilla.
You need to open the wordpress folder and see all of the contents in the wordpress folder. Highlight all of the items by clicking on the first one in the list, hold shift, and click the last one in the list. Then you need to move the files and folders to the root, which is otherwise called public_html. Make sure that your files end up IN the public_html directory and not outside with the public_html directory.
This will take a few minutes because your blog will have a lot of pages to transfer over.
Now, if you are using permalinks, you will want to go back to your blog admin and click on settings, and then choose the permalinks setting. You will want to make sure that the permalinks are set to http://yourdomain.com
and not http://yourdomain.com/wordpress.
AND THATS IT! You have officially moved your blog from a folder, into your root directory!
and remember, I am easy to get a hold of, so contact me if you have any problems.
Want to know who is offering this awesome content? Here it is! Someone who is relatively new to web design. I am new enough to still remember how absolutely frustrating it was to try and get anything done in this field, but have also been around long enough to be able to help those that are where I was a year ago.
Aside from web design, I run the office of my dad's engineering business, and do book keeping by trade.
I love my pets.. All 6 cats, 1 peg legged dogs, and 1 hedgehog. LOVE THEM!!
Oh yea, and my husband. He lets me chase my dreams and I let him do the same. We are happy people because of it. Read more from this author
Finally — a tutorial an idiot like me can understand! That Codex was making my head spin. Thanks so much for an easy-to-understand tutorial (and for talking me out of just creating a splash page — an idea I thought was pretty original, ha!)
worked like a charm!
a few additional tips – your path to your uploaded images will be “dead” so you need to update those
Thank you SO much for this!!! i knew i had to get my wordpress into my home directory at some stage. And this took all the pain out of it! I have successfully put wordpress in and now i don’t need a splash page which is a big YAYAYAYAY!!!!
Worked great for me, thank you so much! It also appeared to change the permalinks automatically, as far as I can tell.
THANK YOU so much for this article! I’ve been wanting to move my WordPress blog to the root directory for the past year or so, but was always afraid to do it (since if anything got screwed up, I’d honestly have no idea how to fix it). On a whim, I finally decided to take the plunge tonight. Oh my gosh, it could not have been easier. I followed your directions, and it took all of 10 minutes. It was so painless, and everything works just fine.
I am soo happy to help and thank you so much for commenting – it is very much appreciated
Thanks for your tutorial…being a bit of a hack myself, I found it much more user friendly and practical than other instructions for moving wordpress to your root.
worked like a charm…much appreciated and highly recommended.
Hi
I am a complete newbie at this and nothing is making sense. I have a wordpress hosting account with GoDaddy, and I have sucessfully designed and published my WP website/blog. BUT I don’t like the .com/wordpress on my domain url. Just looks unprofessional. I do not have a FTP program. I am fairly good at following precise directions but in the codex instructions, I can’t seem to get past point 1, feels like I am missing some vital information. I am just about on the brink of paying a programmer to sort it out for me.
Any easy step-by-step instructions for WP idiots like me would be very much appreciated. (Have searched all over the web for a video tutorial but could not find anything)
Thanks
Merrin
You have made a very common newbie mistake. WordPress.com accounts (when you go to wordpress.com and create an account on their site for free) does NOT give you the ability to use a lot of the multitudes of templates out there and edit them and FTP to them. It seems you have two things going on. You signed up for Godaddy, but you did not set it up to host your blog because then you signed up for wordpress. WordPress.com accounts host your blog for you, and godaddy hosts a custom install of wordpress.
You will want to install wordpress on your godaddy account and ignore your wordpress.com account. Once you have wordpress installed, you will pick and theme you like and install that. If you do not already own a domain name, you can purchase one through goDaddy. then you link your domain to your godaddy HOSTING which has wordpress on it.
If this doesn’t make sense, you can skype me. I will walk you through it if you want. Linzardb on skype
Took me a while to figure out the root directory for Laughing Squid. It is the web/content folder. Got it working great with your help
Easy as pie !!
Awesome…so easy and worked great!