Changing directory structure after install – tricky issue to solve

  • Resolved radowl

    (@radowl)


    10 years, 9 months ago

    Hi. I’ve got a tricky question I can’t find the answer to in the support database. I initially installed WP outside of the www folder. So instead of WP running at https://www.dreams123.net, it runs at https://www.dreams123.net/wp. Since I was using WP to create the site’s index and didn’t know how to change the setting after installing in the wrong folder, I asked the hosting company to create a domain forwarder. They did it for free (cool folks at Hudson Valley Host). So now when someone enters https://www.dreams123.net it forwards to dreams123.net/wp.

    I solved one problem and created another. I just discovered that the odd structure is killing my search engine traffic and incoming links because search engines are looking at https://www.dreams123.net for content, and the content is in the WP folder.

    Before I start hacking away to fix the problem I thought I’d ask the kind experts in the support forum about the best fix. If I move WP to the www directory, will I have to change all of my links? Right now everything is set up with an extra WP in it. What I mean is, for example, to log in I go to https://dreams123.net/wp/wp-login.php. Every internal link has that extra WP and I’ve created a lot of content. If I gotta bite the bullet and change it all by hand I will, but if I don’t have to, well, that’s preferable.

    Thank you for your help!!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • If you’ve not manually generated your internal links (such as when writing a blog post, hand-crafting the links) then you should be ok… because WP dynamically creates the absolute URL’s from the domain you setup in the Settings/General menu of your admin dashboard.

    In the event you are concerned, you can always do a find/replace on the database after you migrate it (or before even) to replace the /wp suffix and ensure that all links are “clean” to the root of the main domain.

    There are plenty of tools for doing this kind of work, but either way you can always give it a try using ManageWP.com for example… where you have a backup of the current setup “just in case” you need to revert.

    Thread Starter radowl

    (@radowl)

    Hey, thanks for the advice. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Only had to change a setting, copy the htaccess and index files to the root directory, and change a line of code in the index file. So far so good.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Changing directory structure after install – tricky issue to solve’ is closed to new replies.