multisite/multi domain names help

added a sub domain of town.companyname.co.uk

I hope you did not create this sub-domain manually outside of WordPress.

now i want to redirect TownService.co.uk to town.companyname.co.uk so that all pages load in the address bar as townservice.co.uk. I’ve tried masking the URL townservice.co.uk but obviously that just shows TownService.co.uk in the address bar all the time.

You should point townservice.co.uk to the primary Multisite domain, companyname.co.uk

Then go into your Multisite settings and configure townservice.co.uk as the PRIMARY domain for town.companyname.co.uk

WordPress should take care of the rest if configured correctly. You don’t need to manually do any URL masking or fiddle with DNS for individual sub-domains.

Do you have an email address I can ping you on? Have done as instructed but it’s not quite working.

Would have loved to jump in and help. Unfortunately, it’s against the forums regulations to seek or offer direct support.

Are you able to post your actual URLs? I want to see if the “pointing” is done correctly or not.

Hi Justin,

OK, so your PRIMARY Multisite domain is swptltd.co.uk

Before even worrying about the domain mapping, the sub-domain ipswich.swptltd.co.uk should work. But I couldn’t get it to open. (Note that even after setting up the domain mapping correctly, the original subdomain should still work: it should just forward to the mapped domain. But yours doesn’t work at all)

Now with mapping ipswichpat-testing.co.uk, note that BEFORE you even start mapping this domain to the sub-domain, visiting ipswichpat-testing.co.uk in the browser should take you to the primary multisite domain swptltd.co.uk

I don’t know what Plesk calls this, but on a cPanel system, you’d be “PARKING” ipswichpat-testing.co.uk on top of swptltd.co.uk such that visiting the former takes you to the latter.

If you’re manually doing this from a DNS manager, you’d CNAME ipswichpat-testing.co.uk to point to swptltd.co.uk. (You could also do an A-record mapping, but that can get tricky if you have other sites on the same server).

So, here are your steps…

1. Get the sub-domain ipswich.swptltd.co.uk working first. This should work at all times, even after the mapping is done successfully.
2. PARK ipswichpat-testing.co.uk on top of swptltd.co.uk, such that visiting the former takes you to the latter.
3. Get into Multisite and add ipswichpat-testing.co.uk as a secondary domain for ipswich.swptltd.co.uk (not that you’re not literally editing the subdomain URL and replacing it with the new domain… you’re adding the new domain… that’s why it’s called mapping). The two exist, but are mapped together and both lead to the same site)
4. Still in Multisite, now set ipswichpat-testing.co.uk as the PRIMARY domain for ipswich.swptltd.co.uk

I’m online for the next 3 hours and waiting for your response to help you. It’s a shame that we can’t connect directly though 😀

Hello Justin,

I’ve just finished two different multisite installations on two servers, and I managed to get domain mapping working on both installations using the native domain mapping feature.

The first setup was on a cPanel based server. I followed pretty much the steps I described above, with minor deviations for the domain setup inside WordPress.

But I wanted to see how this would work in your environment (Plesk)…

So I went ahead and ordered a cloud server (you gotta love hourly billing!), installed a trial version of Plesk control panel, and went through the entire WordPress + MUltisite + Domain Mapping installation and configuration a second time. Again, it worked outright.

Here’s a memory dump of what I did with the Plesk setup:

1. I setup WordPress and activated sub-domain multisite my primary domain, ghanalifeinsurance.com

2. I use CloudFlare to manage DNS for this domain. So I setup wildcard DNS (CNAME), pointing *.ghanalifeinsurance.com to ghanalifeinsurance.com

After this, visiting anything.ghanalifeinsurance.com took me to the default Plesk page.

3. In Plesk, I setup wildcard subdomain for ghanalifeinsurance.com by entering * into the sub-domain box and keeping the default document root /htdocs

After this, entering aything.ghanalifeinsurance.com into the browser now took me to the multisite signup page with the message “registration disabled”.

4. At this time I knew the setup was working perfectly. So I jumped into WordPress and created my first sub-domain site, accra.ghanalifeinsurance.com, wich worked instantly.

Now, on to the domain mapping!

5. The domain I used was fwhd.ga, which also uses CloudFlare for DNS management. In CloudFlare, I pointed A-record for the domain to my Plesk server’s IP address. After this, visiting the domain fwhd.ga took me to the default Plesk webpage once again.

6. I jumped into Plesk and added my domain fwhd.ga as an ALIAS on top of the primary domain ghanalifeinsurance.com. After this, visiting fwhd.ga now took me to the ghanalifeinsurance.com multisite signup page, just like a random subdomain would.

7. Finally, I jumped into Multisite swapped out the subdomain site address accra.ghanalifeinsurance.com for fwhd.ga. Immediately I was able to access this sub-domain site with the new domain fwhd.ga, and visiting the sub-domain accra.ghanalifeinsurance.com now takes me to the multisite signup page, as if this subdomain site never existed at all.

Note that hosting companies sometimes customize control panel software, so my plain Plesk interface may be different from your own, but the principles and procedures will be the same.

I hope that helps!

(Now off I go to shut down the server before I end up with a big bill)