How to Assign Add-on Domain

  • Resolved DinoG

    (@dinog)


    10 years ago

    Hi, I’m helping a friend who just bought a primary domain on BlueHost and is about to build her pages there in WordPress. We’ve both build websites before, but never with WordPress. I’ve not been able to find any answer to our question online, and even BlueHost tech support was stumped.

    She has her primary domain hosted with BlueHost, but she has another website, with a different domain, hosted by SBI (Site Build It). She wants to migrate her SBI site to BlueHost and re-build it with WordPress. Of course, she must re-build each page manually and this will take weeks.

    She set up an add-on domain and gave it the name of her SBI site. She now wondered how to install WordPress on this add-on domain (she already has WordPress installed on her primary BlueHost domain). I told her to instead use the WordPress Multisite feature, and since she wasn’t tech savvy, I did that myself.

    I went to Add Site in the Dashboard for her primary domain. For example, suppose her SBI site’s domain was SBI-domain.com. I added the new site and called it SBIdomain (without the hyphen, since they’re not allowed, but her SBI domain does have a hyphen).

    The question is how do we associate this newly added site in her dashboard to her add-on domain? She needs somewhere to build her pages until it’s ready to be transferred from SBI to BlueHost. The goal is to obviously have the SBI site transferred to BlueHost and for it to stay on its own, separate domain from the primary domain. I’ve read about plugins for domain mapping but I don’t think that applies here. We’re new to WordPress and hope someone can help, as I can’t find a solution online to this specific problem and BlueHost was clueless (they didn’t know what MultiSite was and claimed they didn’t support it).

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • dcleek

    (@dcleek)

    10 years ago

    Hey DinoG,

    When you installed Multisite, was it with sub-domains or sub-directories?

    If you want to wait and build the site before transferring the domain name to Bluehost, I would add the new site in your Network and work on it there. The domain would temporarily be one of the following depending on your setup:

    Sub-domain: sitename.domain.com
    Sub-directory: domain.com/sitename

    Then, once the site is ready to go live, you can use a Domain Mapping plugin to map the domain to the new site. So, when you go to sitename.domain.com, it would become newdomain.com.

    http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/

    In Bluehost, your domain needs to be Parked instead of Add-on. The Add-on domain would point to it’s own folder. You need it to point to the main directory in order for the Domain Mapping to work correctly. I can’t remember, but you may be able to specify where the Add-on domain points. If so, make it point to the root of your site.

    https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/84

    I hope that helps!

    Thread Starter DinoG

    (@dinog)

    10 years ago

    Thank you very much for the reply. My friend ended up consulting with someone who recommended she not use Multisite. She just installed WP on the add-on domain directly, and it appears to be all sorted out now. Thank you again.

    dcleek

    (@dcleek)

    10 years ago

    You’re welcome!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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