Moving WP from a subfolder to root but…

Hi, I need some help in moving my WordPress installation from a subfolder into the root directory but I don’t think it’s as simple as in some cases. This is going to be quite long but I need to go into detail to explain what’s happening and where I am now.

I first wrote my site in 2004 using HTML via Frontpage (remember that?). It worked well but in 2016 it was starting to get very outdated so I switch to using WordPress.

I read that it was better to put WordPress into a subfolder because that gave you added security. Apparently, hackers assume it’ll be in the root and if it’s not it’s harder to find – true or not I don’t know but that’s why I installed WordPress in a subfolder. It also allowed me to build the new version of the site while my old one was still active.

I switched to using my WordPress site by changing the URL settings in WordPress and everything was fine. I started having trouble with the hosts though as their servers kept going down so I switched hosting companies in 2018. The new hosts handled the migration for me and all was fine until recently.

When WordPress 5.7 came out it crashed my whole site. I got a message saying “Theme can’t be found” or something similar so I contacted my hosting company. They said that I had 2 installations of WordPress and that it was a very odd setup, the like of which they hadn’t seen before.

I had one WP installation in my root and one in a subfolder. They said there was a conflict because some of my resources were being saved in one WP and some in another and that they were somehow working in tandem with each other. I asked them through live-chat whether it would be safe to delete the WP in the root seeing as I didn’t know what that was and it had always lived in this subfolder. They said yes go ahead because I can always restore a backup anyway.

I went ahead and deleted the WP in the root folder and it made the whole site crash, so much so that even a restore didn’t fix it. After several hours of working on it a senior technician said that they had got the site working but the setup was very odd and I need a coder to sort it out because it’s beyond the scope of what they can do.

I noticed that my site was fine now running on WP 5.7 but all my images had gone. They said they couldn’t help and it was too complicated to fix but I did fix it by turning off Lazy Loading which bought all the images back.

So…I now have a site that works but it’s very messy. I have WP installed in a subfolder but there’s a copy of all the files from that subfolder also in the root.

All I want to do is have the whole site running from the root instead of this subfolder to clean it all up so…

1) How can I tell if the WP files in the root are doing anything? I have thought of moving or deleting them but I don’t want to do anything that might not be fixed with a restore.
2) Would migrating the site from the subfolder to the root work using a program like Updraft Migrate? I know it normally would but with all this mess would it overwrite/remove unnecessary files from the root?
3) Does any of this actually matter? The site runs fine from a subfolder so is it best to just leave it as it is or will I run into problems later?

Thanks for any help anybody can give. I’m not a pro coder and think I’ve done well to teach myself enough to get this far!

• This topic was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by silvercarpet. Reason: Typo

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]