Building a new instance of wordpress in a subdirectory and migrating to root

  • My website is coming up on it’s 7th anniversary and we’re looking to take the leap into the modern world with a fresh new look that is responsive and has more functionality than our current theme. We want little to no downtime in the transition as we’re very high traffic and we want to be able to provide the same quality news and updates to our readers that we have in the past in the midst of the transition.

    With that said, I’ve done a little bit of research on my own but I still have a few questions before I’m ready to make the leap. So, here goes.

    I found some great information in the codex about moving an instance of wordpress between directories: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

    Our current version of WordPress lives on the root at https://behindthethrills.com. I plan to build the new website in the background in a subdirectory /new. Once I’m finished with it, I was hoping I would be able to follow the steps listed in the link above from codex to move the existing website to /old. Once the move is complete, then I’d like to move the website in the /new directory to the root.

    In terms of migrating content, I’m very familiar with exporting the content and reimporting it. I’ve had to do it in the past so I’m not worried about content at all. I’m more worried about making this migration as seamless as possible so we keep traffic flowing as normal.

    Is there anything else I should know? Anyone have any tips? I just want to make sure I have my ducks in line before we make the jump to avoid excessive downtime.

    Thanks a bunch!

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  • When the old website is still running at https://behindthethrills.com https://behindthethrills.com and the new website is all ready and done at https://behindthethrills.com/new, then it’s not too much work to switch it around.

    The only thing I’d suggest is that when you move all the files of the current site to “old” subdirectory, of course do NOT include the “new” subdirectory in that move. So it’s basically simple 3 step process:

    And make sure you do everything listed under the “Using a pre-existing subdirectory install” section.

    Thread Starter BehindTheThrills

    (@behindthethrills)

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for a timely response. So not only will I need to follow the steps listed in ‘Moving a Root install to its own directory’ but also ‘Using a pre-existing subdirectory install’?

    And I can do the same to move the new site from the sub directory /new to the root?

    “Moving a Root install to its own directory” is for when you installed WordPress in the root of your site and you want to move it to a subdirectory (“wp” or “wordpress” or anything). That doesn’t apply to you, so you can totally skip that part. For your OLD site (since that won’t be used anymore), you can just move all the files from the root to a subdirectory and leave it at that.

    “Using a pre-existing subdirectory install” is for when you installed WordPress in a subdirectory (“wp” or “wordpress” or, in your case “new”) and you want to make it appear at https://www.yoursite.com (as opposed to https://www.yoursite.com/new ).

    Thread Starter BehindTheThrills

    (@behindthethrills)

    Sorry for the delayed response. I missed the email notification and got busy. Thanks for your help and feedback. I’ll be ready for migration this week.. Will be testing it out first with a fresh copy of wordpress to work out any problems that might arise just in case!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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