The URL or domain name is by far the simple most important feature of your website. Everyone who visits your website will have to access via the domain name or URL. Having the ability to change it is very useful when it comes to various situations.
There are various situations that you have to change domains, moving to a subdomain, updating from www domain to non-www domain, moving files around, moving from a sub-domain to a main domain or even migrating from HTTP to HTTPS. Whatever the case may be, there are a few different options you have when it comes to changing the URL, some more advanced than others.
In this article, we are going to cover how to use the WP-CLI tool to change the URL of our WordPress website. WP-CLI is the official command line tool for provided by the WordPress team for interacting with and managing your WordPress sites.
The WP-CLI command line tool is essentially a handy application to run various WordPress tasks. Download the WP-CLI command line tool into the WordPress root folder using CURL or WGET.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
Check if the tool is working.
php wp-cli.phar --info
Alternatively, You can follow the tutorial here to view the set-up wp-cli on your server. Not run the search and replace command to look through all the core tables to change the URL.
php wp-cli.phar search-replace 'http://www.olddomain.com' 'http://www.newdomain.com'
This will save you numerous hours and give you some peace of mind!
Alternatively, you can use the option update commands below to change the URL.
wp option update home 'http://example.com' wp option update siteurl 'http://example.com'
Since people have multiple plugins installed and setup, you want to test this on a staging environment before running it on a production site.
