Need Help Thinking Through Strategy of Moving Install Directory/Path

Hey Gang,

First, let me start out by saying that I install my own WordPress on my own servers, I am familiar with the instructions on HOW to move the installation directory, etc. What I’m wanting here is some good feedback and strategy on whether or not I should, and if so, best-practices.

I built my site on WordPress a long time ago primarily for a blog. I was mostly blogging on music/worship-related topics. Because I thought to myself “one day, I may want a dedicated home page or landing page on my root domain, so I’ll install WordPress in a /myblog/ subdirectory.

So / redirects itself (via .htaccess file) to — again, I set it up this way nearly 18 years ago thinking that some day, I may wanna build other content on the root domain, separate from the blog (not seeing how WordPress would eventually become the tool to build the entire site anyway)

Fast-forward to 2018. The main purpose of the blog is as the engine for my podcast, but I do still write some content-articles and there are a number of much older blog articles on church music, etc., that are ranked and still drive traffic to the site.

With the current theme (which I really like, btw) – the homepage is built using the theme and the Elementor features. It is a decent landing page and the blog posts that show up there are restricted only to specific categories.

I really wish now that all of that was happening on my root domain, and that if people wanted to see ALL of the blog posts (podcast posts but also content-posts) they’d go to /myblog … the existing landing page, and other pages that are on the site would be / instead of all coming from /myblog

I think you all have the idea. What should I do? How devastating would my search traffic and site ranking be if I made such a drastic move. I’m thinking if the install directory is in the root instead of /myblog that the actual URLS wouldn’t change, if I made the /myblog/ directory the home for the blog posts anyway, right?

Truth is, I don’t get much traffic anyway – but the site has been online since 2002 so nearly 18 years!

Hit me with your best strategies and feedback. Should I just leave it alone? Should I move the install directory to root, and let the /myblog/ directory still be the path to all the blog entries, etc?

For all the pages and posts that were no longer in the /myblog/ subdirectory, but moved to the main directory – will Google auto-fix that, or will I have to do massive permanent redirects, etc?

• This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by fmckinnon.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

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