Moving a WordPress blog from a subdirectory to subdomain preserving permalinks

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*) http://blog.hjelmen.org/ [R=301,NC]

The old directory was, as mentioned /blog.

Thank you very much. It seems that I had not only screwed up during copy/paste, but had also copied the file into a wrong directory.

That’ll teach me to cd correctly 😛

Thanks for the correction, and for a good guide 😀

I’ve tried the instructions above and got a redirect loop as well but my htaccess appers to have been correct and in the root directory.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^wordpress/(.*) http://blog.wardelldesign.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

I want to amend my comment with the understanding that I need to then update the htaccess to make sure that old links directly to http://www.research2zero.com/blog/ are pointed to blog.research2zero.com

This is the base file that my CMS Installation put in the folder (drupal) I had to remove the lines I added because, like i said, the site is high trafficed and I can only take it down for seconds if it’s not functioning right I rewrite with a fucntioning file.

I’m not sure if I have the code I was putting in to recreate the Internal Errors but I’ll try to recreate it.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule (.*)\.xml(.*) $1.php$2 [nocase]
DirectoryIndex index.php
ErrorDocument 404 /processor.php

Here is what I was modifying too in a ton of variations

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %(HTTP_HOST) ^subdomain.domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/subdomain/$1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule (.*)\.xml(.*) $1.php$2 [nocase]
DirectoryIndex index.php
ErrorDocument 404 /processor.php

I wish I had the exact code, but I added two lines, I think the code I have in now was redirecting subdomain.domamin.com/any-page to domain.com/subdomain but not to the specific page it was for so all my pages were just going to the domain.com/subdomain which I can’t have happen, I need all the links to be seemlessly migrated to the new URL.

You probably already know what it should say though or what the correct code is without me figuring out what I had in there that I thought should solve the problem but instead was recreating internal errors.

Hi Rahul,

Here I need one help related with this.

Recently I removed global translator plugin (mostly it is temporary). As you might know, GT creates translated pages based on folders like italian version of my site would be accessed at http://www.techpavan.com/it/ The problem now is I have removed my translated pages and they all are resulting in 404s, but I would like to redirect all them to related page on my English main website.

If someone is driven to techpavan.com/it/somepage/ I want him to be redirected to techpavan.com/somepage/ and I want that to be a 302 redirect as I may make use of the plugin again.

I tried to make use of the method you said above, but somehow failed to succeed, and in my case all should be written in the same htaccess file. Could you please help me with codes.

Thanks

Thanks dude… that’s of help 🙂

I am trying to move from subdomain.domain.com structure to domain.com/subdirectory.

But I am not sure if the page rank of subdomain.domain.com will be transferred to domain.com/subdirectory

And could you also list the pros and cons of both?

I have wordpress installation at http://digilib.stikom.edu/humas/ittv. All posting and comment running well at this URL. When I want to change this subdirectory to sub domain, why all my permalink get error? few of my image also missing.

I already change the WordPress Address and Blog Address at Setting > General. Is there any problem with my htaccess ?
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

I just want to confirm something before I try your suggestion, to make sure I understand the process. Once I set up the .htaccess in the root directory as you indicated, and have moved all the wordpress files in /blog to just / and updated the wordpress address and blog address from within wordpress (BEFORE moving files, I know), any links that refer to /blog are automatically redirected to just / before the page even loads in the browser, right? So it doesn’t matter that the /blog directory is deleted, ya? Thanks!

Just wanted to say thank you very much for this post. Had been trying to move my blog from a subdomain back to the main domain and this explained pretty much everything. As I’m using permalinks, the only additional step I had to take was to update the .htaccess file as per point 10 here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
Thanks again.
Damian

I’ve wanted to move wordpress from the subdirectory domain.com/blog to a subdomain – blog.domain.com

I created subdomain – blog.domain.com which points at domain.com/wp first.

Then changed my wordpress and blog address URLS to blog.domain.com

I moved all my wordpress files over to domain.com/wp

Then added the .htaccess file to my root –

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*) http://blog.domain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

At this point, when I go on domain.com/blog it forwards me to blog.domain.com however if I delete the /blog subdirectory like told to in your instructions, when I type in domain.com/blog it comes up with a 404 error page.

What shall I do? Leave the blog subdirectory there? I’m sorry if this seems pointless as it does work in a way, I’m just worried as it wasn’t exactly to what you said.

Rahul,
I have a question that parallels Liza’s. In that I want to move my existing blog at http://www.domain.com to either blog.domain.com or http://www.domain.com/blog. Whichever will provide the best SEO going forward and not lose any existing SEO generated.

In addition, I will be replacing the main domain with an e commerce site. What is the best way to achieve this with the best solution for SEO?

Thanks in advance!

Hi Rahul,
Great Tutorial. I have moved my blog to a subdomain. I changed URLS and files as you instructed. The blog works fine. See my Website address above, but on my main domain now my error 404 document does not come up. I am getting Error 500 like this:

~~Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.~~

I think this is my .htaccess file. Here is what it looks like:

ErrorDocument 404 /vb_404.html
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /petblog/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /petblog/index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^petblog/(.*) http://cherishmypets.vivbounty.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

My blog used to be at http://vivbounty.com/petblog

I would appreciate any corrections to my .htaccess you might be able to provide to make my error404 doc work on my main domain.

Thanks in advance,
VivBounty

Hi there.

Thanks a lot for your tutorial. But i’d like to add a couple of things, because i had some issues moving from /blog to blog.weasfrikis.cl

First of, as soon as you can log in to the admin panel, make sure to go to the Plugins Tab and disable them all. This because a lot of the config files keep records on plain text in the options table of the plugins, pointing to the old address.

Then you can go and set them up one by one to confirm they have the new url correctly saved and without issues on your blog.

The other thing that is important is to enter the “Permalink” tab. Even though it might have written the correct URL for the links, press the SAVE button to “refresh” the database.

This would avoid the “404 not Found” post/article/page issue.

Also if you are getting “500 Internal Server Error”, you might have to edit the WordPress .htaccess file and comment the info using # at the beginning of the file because it makes a horrific loop inside the server.

I hope this answers everybody’s problems as I had to figure them out.

Thanks a lot again!!

Greets From Chile!

hello,

I had installed wordpress on root. say for example : http://www.mydomain.com

I was posting there since last 2 years.

Now I have shifted that blog to : subdomain.mydomain.com/folder/

and then installed a fresh wordpress on root at : http://www.mydomain.com

So my old article links is broken.

Can you please guide me, how I can reduce effect of SEO. Where I should put .htaccess file and what I should write in that ?

please help.

If you want to change the all URL from you database so may be this helpful to you.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://dev.your_domain_name.com’, ‘http://www.your_domain_name.com’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ‘siteurl’;
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://dev.your_domain_name.com’,’http://www.your_domain_name.com’);
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://dev.your_domain_name.com’, ‘http://www.your_domain_name.com’);

Any updates on this brother?

Awesome!

FYI I also had to add this line to the .htaccess file:
redirect /olddirectory http://articles.inneralchemycenter.com/
because inneralchemycenter.com/olddirectory would not redirect with your .htaccess mod
inneralchemycenter.com/olddirectory/ and all other links redirected but not inneralchemycenter.com/olddirectory (w/o trailing slash)
All the other permalinks redirected like a charm, and with the extra line inneralchemycenter.com/olddirectory (w/o trailing slash) also redirected.

Another thing, at first I couldn’t get it to work because I was not moving files from olddirectory. I didn’t have the need to put them in a new directory, however, the .htaccess file would not start redirecting until I did move the olddirectory to a new one. That is, at first I just pointed the subdomain to my old directory, trying to save a step, but then I changed old directory name to a new name, and repointed my subdomain. Now it works perfect!

Thanks again for the great and simple instructions!

Tom

i want to update wordpress site as “http://blogname.domain.com/”
which is currently “http://domain.com/blogname/”
the “blogname” will change for each blog, it will not remain to “blog”
can you help?