Cannot change site address or url in WP settings

Hi,

it’s possible that the site and home address are greyed out because they are defined in your wp-config.php file. Can you check if your wp-config.php file contains this:

define(‘WP_HOME’,’https://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’https://example.com’);

The home- and siteurl can also be hardcoded in the theme’s functions.php, you can check that as well. See https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Changing_The_Site_URL for more information.

Mark

The reason you saw this message (config not writable), is because your site url and home url were already defined in your wp-config.php at the moment you activated. When the plugin detects this, to switch your site to https, the plugin needs to be able to write to the wp-config.php so it can change these lines to https.

Because of this, these sections already must have been greyed out in the general settings before you installed the plugin: otherwise you would not get this message.

Of course you can easily adjust this by editing your wp-config.php.

Hi.

I would like top ask you for help.

I am setting up a family website on my synology nas that is not meant for google or the internet for everyone to find.
All is going well except for the below part and that is to change the site url from the ip adress to my domainname anneplusfredrik.se

The issue is step 3 under the section wordpress.

I have been in contact with synology but they referred me to you.

Below you see what has happened.

2018-10-09 11:46:19
Hello Fredrik,

Thank you for your reply.

Your Family should be able to access the website through the Domain Address/wordpress.

For example if my domain address was https://www.paul.com, then they would access it using https://www.paul.com/wordpress.

You can set this so that you do not need to enter /wordpress at the end of the domain. To do this you will need to set up a Virtual Host and set this address within WordPress.

[Virtual Host]

1) Log into DSM and open Web Station.

2) Navigate to the Virtual Host and select “Create”.

3) Enter the Hostname and set the settings, as well as selecting the document root.

______0.jpg

You will need to do this for different addresses such as 3london.org (no www. infront).

[WordPress]

1) Log into your WordPress account.

2) Go to “Settings” on the left navigation window.

3) Set the Site Address (URL) to the desired URL.

Please confirm how your family will be accessing the website, locally or externally?

If it is for them to access externally, then I can confirm there is no way to lock a website down.

A website is either accessible by all or none.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Best Regards,
Paul

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Hi Frederik,

do you get any sort of error when changing the site address to your domain name? Since the site runs locally this might result in issues. Should your family only be able to see the site when they are on the same network as you, or should the site be accessible from different network as well?

Mark

Hi, thanks for your quick reply.
I do not get an error, when i try to change the ip adress to anneplusfredrik.se it does not allow me to change it, i can not save the change.

Since my family not really like to have there faces searchable on google and alike i would like them to gain access to the website that i have on my nas via a link that i share with them.

I’m not sure why it’s not letting you change the site address, you can try any of the options listed in this article to see if that does work: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Changing_The_Site_URL.

Do note that if you want your family to be able to visit the site you’d have to make changes to your domains DNS configuration as well, pointing the DNS records to your nas and make sure that the nas can be visited outside of your local network. However, this will result in the site becoming available for the whole internet.

To prevent other internet users from accessing the site you could block all connections using a web application firewall like Sucuri or Wordfence that supports access blocking based on geolocation, blocking all access except for a couple of whitelisted IP numbers that belong to your family.

Thanks for the help, it worked out for me!

A developer has this plugin on three of my sites, and it appears to be a problem as both www and non www versions of the site are live and recognized, eg the preferred domain is not being recognized, and the setting area is greyed out. isthere a fix for this?

Hi @thanp73,

This is not caused by Really Simple SSL. Like the original poster of this topic, you have probably defined the site_url in your wp-config.php, like this:

define(‘WP_HOME’,’https://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’https://example.com’);

If you do this, WordPress will disable the settings/general URL fields.

Removing the defines will resolve the issue.

As for the redirect: Really Simple SSL only handles redirects from http to https. WordPress will normally handle redirects to the primary URL. If this is not the case (possibly because of caching or something similar), you can add a custom .htaccess redirect, as described here:
https://really-simple-ssl.com/knowledge-base/avoid-landing-page-redirects/

thanks for the quick response- the wp-config is this:
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, SP_REQUEST_URL);
define(‘WP_HOME’, SP_REQUEST_URL);

yet i am able to log in, in separate browser tabs, to both www and non www versions of the site and see, greyed out, both the www and non www url paths, on those respective pages. It appears that i have two versions of the site, one www and another non, and don’t know how to set the preferred www. version automatically, and (sorry if it’s inappropriate here ) this thread was the only place i found a potential solution/ plugin conflict

If you can change the SP_REQUEST_URL to your actual site_url, either with or without www, the problem should be solved I think. Currently, the site takes the URL with which it is requested, so if you type in www, it loads with www as primary URL. If you type in without www, it loads with the non www as primary URL.

Of course I don’t know why it was set up this way, so I also don’t know if this is necessary for some reason, but if possible I would change this.

SP_REQUEST_URL is generally used on sites that use ServerPilot. It allows you to point and use multiple domains on a WordPress instance (defining them as the HTTP_HOST request header). Without this, WordPress will simply redirect to the site’s site_url in the database. It is only useful if you wish to point multiple domains to the same WordPress instance – If you don’t need this capability, you can simply change (or comment out) WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME values to your web site’s URL (ex: https://mycompanydomain.com).

This is how it’s usually defined:

define( 'SP_REQUEST_URL', ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] ? 'https://' : 'https://') . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] );

define( 'WP_SITEURL', SP_REQUEST_URL );
define( 'WP_HOME', SP_REQUEST_URL );

If you don’t need this capability, you could change it to something like:

define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'https://mycompanydomain.com' );
define( 'WP_HOME', 'https://mycompanydomain.com' );

If you wish to control the site’s URL via WP Admin, you can simply remove or comment out the above lines.

@hendridm Kind of similar issue I am having with my local site configuration. My local site always trying to redirect to https.

I have configured a WordPress site locally from a remote database and project backup which my client has provided.

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and hence set up the site locally as local.clientsite.com and configured properly via /etc/hosts, /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, /etc/apache2/sites-available and by enabling the site. I configured a few sites in the same fashion in the past successfully.

Now the problem is whenever I am running local.clientsite.com, it is trying to redirect to https://local.clientsite.com. To prevent this I modified values of site_url and home in wp_options table to use https://local.clientsite.com.

Apart from updating values in wp_options, I added the following two lines in wp-config.php as well:

define('WP_HOME','https://local.clientsite.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://local.clientsite.com');

But could not get rid of this!

Content of /etc/hosts file

...
127.0.0.1   local.clientsite.com
...

Content of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

...
<Directory /var/www/wp-projects/clientsite>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>
...

Contents of both /etc/apache2/sites-available/local.clientsite.com.conf and /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/local.clientsite.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ...
   ServerAdmin [email protected]
   ServerName local.clientsite.com

   ServerAlias local.clientsite.com
   DocumentRoot /var/www/wp-projects/clientsite
   ...
</VirtualHost>

Please suggest!

Hi @subrataemfluence

possible the site has an .htaccess file which contains a redirect to https://. Another possibility is the site sending an HSTS header, forcing all requests to https://. This header should also be apparent in the .htaccess file. If it’s there, you can remove it and clear HSTS from your browser as described here: https://really-simple-ssl.com/knowledge-base/clear-hsts-browser/

@markwolters I tried everything but there was no luck!