Accidently changed site or home url? don't panic!

For some unclear reason, WordPress allows you to change the site’s url, which after being done renders the site inaccessible and unloginable.

That’s what happened to me. I changed those values in the general settings page, and afterward the site redirected to the “new” url, and whenever I logged in, the login page took me back to login again, with no message or clue to what happened.

Sure, I could change the siteurl field in wp-options table in the database, but I had no access to it, no phpmyadmin at my disposal, and not to mention any decent database directory permissions…

Well, after hours of trying to reupload the backup database I prepared before starting to work (it didn’t help, permissions again), defining siteurl in wp-config.phpand other tips I got on other help pages, I finally found something that worked:

Adding the lines:

update_option('siteurl','http://example.com/blog');
update_option('home','http://example.com/blog');

to the beginning of functions.php did the job for me. I got it on http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL, though many other tricks from that page didn’t help.

I wasted so much precious time on this silly “feature” of the WordPress back-end, so I decided to share. Hope it will help someone.

Webleo