Changing url of subsites one level down

  • Hi everyone.
    I am running a WP multisite consisting of one main ‘portal’ site, and several subsites for different products (educational books in this case). Some reasons for choosing multisite have been scalability, different administrators and individual branding (css) of sites. The subsites are basically clones of each other – made with NS Cloner and then changed individually.

    The structure is as follows:

    domain.com
    domain.com/productsite1
    domain.com/productsite2
    domain.com/productsite3
    etc

    The site has grown, and now my client wants to change the url-structure by moving subsites one level down into something like:

    domain.com
    domain.com/prodcategory1/productsite1
    domain.com/prodcategory1/productsite2

    domain.com/prodcategory2/productsite3
    domain.com/prodcategory2/productsite4

    domain.com/prodcategory3/productsite5
    etc.

    Is there a way to make this work? I considered using NS Cloner again, cloning each
    domain.com/productsite -> domain.com/prodcategory/productsite and then delete the original productsite, but NS Cloner don’t seem to let me clone to other than a one level down subdir.

    Thanks in advance!

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

  • Interesting issue…….if I were doing this, I would simply add the extra folders needed and move the site files, if you tell WP where to find the new URLs it will adjust accordingly, but I’d also be sure to recreate my permalinks by going to Settings>Permalinks and make a small change and Save. It’s a good idea also to do a search on your DB via phpMyAdmin to be sure you have all your URLs updated.

    If you’ve created any Template files in your Theme, check there and in your Stylesheet to ferret out and fix any hard-coded URLs there (there should not be, but occasionally I’ve seen Theme developers who were building themes for specific clients that did use some hard-coded URLs to cut down on PHP calls).

    It’s critical to carefully coordinate this with the 301 redirects necessary so that you don’t lose traffic or PageRank due to indexing (by the search engines) of the old URLs and anyone who has links bookmarked, and of course I’d schedule it for the time of day (night?) that the sites get the least amount of traffic, or maybe use a “undergoing maintenance” plugin.

    A good broken link checker plugin can help you find an fix any in-content URLs that you might have missed (in particular if you don’t do the find/replace in your DB), but that’s (IMHO) a temporary job – if you leave a link-checker plugin running long term most of them can dramatically slow your site down.

    That said, I would also ask (my) client what their goals are for doing this – it’s not a simple undertaking and there should be some very clear benefit before you tackle this.

    Thread Starter eireken

    (@eireken)

    Thank You TrishaM
    Could you please give some more input on how to ‘add the extra folders needed and move the site files’.

    My main site is installed at domain root and all uploads are now located in:
    public_html/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/
    public_html/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/
    public_html/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/
    etc
    Do I need to physically move them?

    About 301 redirects: the new url-structure comes together with the whole site being moved to a new domain, so a lot of redirects and SEO-cleanup will have to be done anyway :-(.

    Thank you!
    Eirek

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