Changing Your Blog Directory in Wordpress 3.5

If you're like me, you probably began your Wordpress blog in either a default directory, or one with a pretty generic title like this: example.com/blog.  That's all fine but recently I found out that it's better to have the blog URL, which is formed from the name of your domain and the folder your blog resides in. Apparently search engines prefer this. If you are running your blog in the root directory and that's where you want it, then fine, leave everything alone.  If you have several blogs, however, you must have them in different directories. The same applies if you're like me, with a static home-page which is not created in Wordpress. So how can you change the directory title?

In previous versions of Wordpress, this was surprisingly tricky to do, though it was possible. In 3.5 it's a snip and one of the many big improvements. Log in as Admin to your blog, then follow these steps:

1. For safety's sake, back up your content by going to Tools>Export and click the top option, to export all content, and click Export. Enter where you want to save the .xml file with the data, and save.


2. Go to Settings>General. You will see two boxes near the top. 'Wordpress Address' and 'Blog Address'. Alter these so that the target folder address there instead points to the new folder name you want to use. For example, it might say 'example.com/blog' and you want to change to 'example.com/Poetry.  Make these alterations and save your changes by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.


3. You will immediately get a 404 error message but don't panic. Open your ftp program and go to the server where your domain is hosted. Find the folder with the old name, in this case 'blog' and change it to 'Poetry'.  Do NOT delete anything.


4. Now you need to change the links in your home page navigation to point to this location, so open your home page, usually 'index.html'  in whichever html editor you use. Update the link to your blog from 'example.com/blog' to 'example.com/Poetry. Save the page and upload it to the server, over-writing the old one. Then close your ftp connection.


5. Go to your browser, navigate to your home page and check the links are working. If they're not, you've made an error somewhere, which is why we saved the content. Go back through the routine above. Remember, your Wordpress installation is still there on your server, so it's just a question of making sure the links are exactly right.

Really it's a cakewalk and so much easier than before! Do I need to say 'Break a leg'?