How to Make Wordpress your Main Domain - Made Easy

I think one of the most powerful applications of the Wordpress platform is as a fully functioning Content Management System for non-technie website owners to have both static webpages and a blog that can be easily updated from any web browser.

When installing Wordpress to use as your website (this assumes you have purchased a domain name and are using your own hosting account rather than a free site at wordpress.com) the basic installation creates a directory in your hosting account's default directory called /wordpress/ with all the required files.

But, you would like to have your web address be simply: www.yourdomainname.com instead of www.yourdomainname.com/wordpress

This Hub will explain how to do that.

From your Wordpress Dashboard, go to Settings > General and in the middle of the screen you will see a section where you can change the URL that displays for your website.

Leave the setting for Wordpress URL alone (unless you have moved the files from their original installation location). In the site address field, put your domain name with no extra directory settings, just the www.yourdomainname.com.

The next two important steps involve copying 2 files from the /wordpress directory to your site's root directory and making a change to one line of the code in the index.php file. You can make these changes using any text editor and copying the files can be done via your site's control panel or by a web publishing program like Dreamweaver.

First, copy (don't move) both the index.php file and the .htaccess file from the Wordpress directory to your site's root directory.

The next step is to change just one line in the index.php file. Open the file in a text editor and look for the line that reads:

and replace the line that says

require('./wp-blog-header.php');

with 

require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');

Save the file and then upload it to your site's root directory.

That's it. Simple, right? Now your main root domain is the visible location for your Wordpress website.

Related topics include:

• How to Make a Static Homepage for your Wordpress Blog
• How to re-arrange the page links on your Wordpress Site
• How to Make your Wordpress site Search Engine Friendly