How To Use & Change Temporary URL with Wordpress
When transferring your WordPress installation to Bluehost you may need to use the temporary URL, this URL will allow you to access your site before the Name Servers have propagated to ours.
A few of the symptoms or issues you may be running into are:
- My Domain name isn't resolving to my new account yet.
- I don't get any images or themes to show up, just the text.
- I can't log into my Administrator Panel, because logging in wants to take me to a URL with my domain name in it.
- How can I change my settings to allow me to view my WordPress Blog before my domain name resolves?
There are a few cases where you might need to go in and change a URL in the WordPress database.
- My domain name isn't resolving to my new account yet, so I have to visit my WordPress install with a URL like http://box###.temp.domains/~username/. I don't get any images or themes to show up, just the text.
- I also can't log into my Administrator Panel, because logging in wants to take me to a URL with my domain name in it. How can I change my settings to allow me to view my WordPress blog before my domain name resolves?
- The URL appears like http://www.domain.com/addondomain/ and there are no redirects in the .htaccess
- If WordPress was installed to an addon domain, then the database URL will need to be changed to something like http://www.addondomain.com
This requires some simple edits in the database.
- First, make sure that your WordPress installation is complete, and you know what the name of the database is. If Fantastico installed WordPress for you, it's likely the name of the database is something like:
- username_wrd1
- If you don't know the database name, you can use the File Manager to look inside the wp-config.php file to find out its name.
2. Right-click wp-config.php and select Code Edit. You can now see the username and database.
4. Select the database name on the left. (i.e. "_wrd1")
- This will display the names of the Tables to the right.
- This step is crucial so you don't make a mistake. Please take a moment to verify the URL you are typing in here is correct, or you won't see any change.
9. Select the Next button. Look for the option_name home.
10. Select the pencil icon to Edit. Make the same URL change here as you did for siteurl earlier, and click the Go button.
11. Visit your Temporary URL (http://box###.temp.domains/~username/) for your blog, and all the images will show up just fine.
Once you've changed your name servers so your domain name resolves to your account, you don't have to go back into phpMyAdmin to make the change again.
- Log into your WordPress Admin Panel
- Click the tab Settings. Here you will see WordPress and Site address (URL). It is set to your Temporary URL (http://box###.temp.domains/~username/).
- Change this to your domain name with any folders required, and you're back to normal.