Category Archives: multisite

The three places you need to change urls to actually update your WordPress site’s url

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As a bit of sensible site management I recently moved a group of stand-alone WP installs into a single WP multisite instance. WP multisite allows you to serve multiple domains from a single WordPress install, which makes system management much easier. It also makes plugin management exponentially more difficult, but that’s for another day.

I setup a temporary site to do the install and plugin/theme testing, and then once the content was imported I tried to update the WP multisite settings to take over from the previous domain. I went into the Site’s settings, and updated the values for Siteurl and Home.

And it worked, sort of. WP served the right content… but at the wrong domain.

Site Address (URL) =/= Siteurl

Turns out setting new values for the Siteurl and the Home url are only two of the things you need to do.

You also need to update the value for the Site Address (URL). You may have thought that Siteurl and Site Address (URL) are the same things, but you would be wrong.

WP multisite, http, and https

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If you look at the Site Health for your WordPress installation, if you have a relatively old site you may have set it up like http://your.domain, vs https://your.domain -i.e. you didn’t prefix your url with https.

WordPress will complain about this:

You have two options: click on the “Update your site to use HTTPS” button, or to follow the links to WordPress Address and Site Address and edit the values there.

However if you are using a WordPress Network (aka WordPress Multisite), these two links won’t work – they will take you to another Admin page, but you won’t be able to update your Site Settings there, as these values are not available there in a Multisite install.

Solution:

  1. In your menu bar, click on MySites > Network Admin > Sites, and hover over your site name, then click ‘Edit’. Manually change http to https in 3 places: Site Address (URL) (on the Info tab), Siteurl, and Home (both on the Settings tab).
  2. Or just click on ‘Update your site to use HTTPS’. This does work in Multisite.