I wouldn’t recommend your approach. I’ve done what you are trying to do, several times, with great success. But using the approach of building WordPress in a well-named directory, say /wp/ or something like that.
Once my site is ready to go live, I simply renamed (my old HTML site’s) index.html in the root to something like oldindex.html, copied (NOT moved) index.php from the /wp/ directory to the root, changed this copy of index.php to point to /wp/, changed the Site URL in WordPress Settings to point to the root, and did a Save on Permalinks to make all the links appear to the visitor as being the root.
The full details on doing that are here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory#Using_a_pre-existing_subdirectory_install
Manually moving WordPress is a recipe for disaster in my experience.
Thanks jonradio
Thanks for your reply. I was worried that I would have a problem. Any problem with search engines finding pages because of that. Your faking out the person seeing the location bar into thinking its all in the root directory, is google seeing it that way? and if a person types in the address bar the page address he thinks it is, will it go to that page, even thought its in a separate directory?
Would it be better to just get another domain, build the WordPress site on that domain and then transfer my domain name to that new site. There cheep now, my host 1and1 is 99 cents a month for the first year.
Sorry for all the questions, just don’t want to have any unexpected problems after all that work.
I move installations all the time. For me it’s not a big deal, but I’ve got a fair bit of experience under my belt.
The biggest thing that you need to do when you move a site is to update two things:
- Update the hard-coded links in the sites content (this tool works extremely well for that).
- Update your .htaccess file by going into the admin area under ‘Settings -> Permalinks’, setting the permalink structure to ‘default’, and saving, then setting it back to what you have now and saving.
You’re lucky in that you’re keeping the site on the same server so you don’t need to do anything about moving the database as well.
royphotog: with WordPress, as with many other sophisticated web development tools, the URL does NOT tell you where you are going to find an .html file with the contents of the webpage you see on your browser. Most people use WordPress Permalinks that create a structure of subdirectories (“folders”) in the URL that do not exist on the web site.
Likewise, no search engine or visitor will ever know about the WordPress redirection from root to subdirectory.
thanks again to you both, I just put the new site live and did as you said jonradio, worked like a charm.
site is http://www.roydresselphoto.com
I still need a few tweaks to some of the pages but it’s good to go.
this had been a fun experience, spent the last four days figuring out how this whole word press system works and making decisions on the site structure and what pages I wanted to keep on the new site. I have a couple more web sites of my own I need to re do in word press.
Ah crap. I am too late to this post. I was going to mention using 301 redirects in your site root’s .htaccess file will gently move web crawlers and humans who have your old static site bookmarked to the new dynamically generated pages.
Read about that here. This is our standard practice when doing a site redesign from a static HTML site to a CMS, or from one CMS to another if there is significant page structure changes:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
But glad you got the site moved without a hitch.
Not to late jonimueller, and thanks for the tip. I will check it out, it sounds like something that I should implement.
