Point domain name to WP Site?

  • Resolved Christee

    (@cgamron)


    12 years, 1 month ago

    I currently have a domain name (www.somesite.info) registered with one registrar that points to a Google Site. I recently purchased web hosting with a different host, and have created a WordPress site to replace the Google Site. I made the page names the same, and the site is nearly identical (except for some nice enhancements since I’m now using WP ;). With the WP web hosting I received a new domain name – https://www.somesite.us – which I have used while developing the WordPress site.

    Now I’m nearly ready for the WP site to go live. I would like to point https://www.somesite.info to https://www.somesite.us, similar to how it worked for the Google Site. https://www.somesite.info is low volume, but does pretty good in search rankings for its small niche, so I want to keep using it, and have https://www.sitesite.us be invisible to users (just like the Google Site domain name is).

    I’ve talked to both web hosts, and it sounds like that is not really possible. I’m hearing from both that they can make https://www.somesite.info point https://www.somesite.us, but navigating internal links will cause https://www.somesite.us to show in the browser. While very helpful, both web hosts were understandably offering me additional services (the one a domain name transfer, the other web hosting). The end result would be that I would have the hosting and the domain name with the same web host, and then move the WordPress site from .us to .info.

    I understand this will work, but I wanted to input from a more objective audience. Is this really the only way (because if the way WP handles internal links)? Or are there other domain configuration options that can achieve my goal?

    At one point I thought the WordPress Address (URL) or Site Address (URL) general settings might be used for this. But I’ve found that the codex setting descriptions, https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Settings_General_Screen and https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Changing_The_Site_URL, conflict in their descriptions of the fields (the descriptions are flip flopped). Plus, other support questions make it sounds like people have not had good luck changing these. So I’m leery of changing unless someone can better describe them and the impact of changing….?

    Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

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  • Thread Starter Christee

    (@cgamron)

    I resolved this by copying the site to a subdomain and configuring the .info domain name as an addon domain.

    The general steps were:
    1. Create a directory for the subdomain under public_html.
    2. Make a copy of the .us site. Lot of articles on this, but I did this by:
    a. Copy the web site files public_html into the new directory. I used cPanel for this.
    b. Copy the WordPress database. I used myPhpAdmin for this.
    c. Add a user to the new database. I used mySqlDatabase for this.
    d. Modify wp-config.php in the new directory to indicate the new database, username, and password.
    e. Do a safe search and replace on the database. I used the tool from here: https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/ Note: this is NOT a plugin
    3. At my .info domain name registrar:
    a. Change the CNAME record from ghs.google.com to @. This was necessary since the .info domain previously pointed to a google site.
    b. Set the name servers to point to the webhost for the .us domain.
    4. At the .us web host site:
    a. Add the .info as an add-on domain, being sure to pick the directory created in step 1 above (rather than the default where it creates a directory for you).
    b. At this point the .info domain works wonderfully, but you can access it as a subdomain of .us. To prevent this, I modified .htaccess in the new directory (from step 1) as described here: https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/134.

    That’s it. No domain name transfers necessary (in fact, if I had transferred the domain, I still would have needed to do steps 1, 2, and 4). No fees to either web host. Once I started, the whole thing took about 2 hours, but that’s only because I needed to make a couple of support phone calls to learn about steps 2c and 3a. If I did it again, it would take less than 1 hour.

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