Unique Multisite Situation, Subsite Redirects to Primary Domain Always

  • Hello it’s been a while!

    I have a multisite install setup in the root (/public_html) of my server and everything there works great. I do however have some clients that require individual WordPress setups within a “/sites” folder (/public_html/sites). One of those sites needs to run multisite with domain mapping and I can’t get the subsite to do anything but redirect to the primary.

    So let’s say the domains I have are (sitea.com – primary and siteb.com – subsite). sitea.com is setup in “public_html/sites/sitea”. siteb.com is setup as “sitea.com/subsite” in the WordPress Network settings. At the registrar, siteb.com is set to the correct nameservers and has had time to propagate (when I ping it, I get the correct IP). In cPanel, when I setup the siteb.com URL as an add-on domain, I set it to the document root of “/public_html/sites/sitea”. At this point, if I type in siteb.com into a browser, it takes me to sitea.com. If I type in sitea.com/subsite, it takes me to the subsite. However, if I go into the Network Admin and change the site URL to “https://siteb.com”, then typing both into a browser take me to “https://sitea.com”.

    1. The root multisite setup with domain mapping uses folders for subsites. So does the standalone install in public_html/sites. Does this pose a problem?
    2. Is there a problem with the Rewrite rules in .htaccess that conflicts with the root multisite install?
    3. ??? I’m lost here as to what direction I should continue to troubleshoot. I have a feeling that the routing is working correctly in that it’s hitting the primary site, but that something internally isn’t then ensuring that siteb.com is served instead of the primary.

    Any help on this is greatly appreciated!

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

  • sitea.com is setup in “public_html/sites/sitea”. siteb.com is setup as “sitea.com/subsite” in the WordPress Network settings.

    This tells me there’s a third domain involved here, right? Let’s call it example.com

    So we have:

    example.com => public_html

    example.com/sites/sitea => public_html/sites/sitea => sitea.com
    (the first add-on domain)

    Now, the second add-on domain siteb.com => public_html/sites/sitea , which is the same as the path for sitea.com)

    So with this setup, siteb.com, which points to public_html/sites/sitea , will always lead you to sitea.com (and never sitea.com/subsite).

    How do you resolve this? Try these solutions (I’ve not tested any!!!)

    TRY 1: Try any of the domain mapping plugins to see if any of them have some vodoo magic in the back to make this weird setup work.

    Note that if you manage to get this going, you could end up having issues with plugins and cookies farther down the road.

    TRY 2: Instead of using cPanel’s add-on domains for siteb.com, go to the DNS management tool for siteb.com, use CNAME record to point siteb.com directly to sitea.com.

    TRY 3: If you have the budget for this, you could just save yourself all the heartache and setup a new cPanel account for sitea.com, install a new WordPress Multisite in the root (public_html) and continue as you always have.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • The topic ‘Unique Multisite Situation, Subsite Redirects to Primary Domain Always’ is closed to new replies.