How to remove the term WordPress from your site’s URL

If your WordPress website's URL ends in /wordpress or /wp, you may have installed WordPress in a subdirectory or subdomain.

You can get rid of /wordpress or /wp from your site address (URL) by following the steps below:

1. Change the site address in WordPress.
2. Download index.php and .htaccess files.

You can change the site address (URL) in your WordPress admin dashboard.

• Login to your WordPress admin dashboard, eg: yourdomainname.co.za/wp-admin.

• Select ‘Settings’ from the menu on the left-hand side.

• Select ‘Settings’ and below that select 'General'.

• Under 'General Settings', in the ‘Site Address (URL)’ field remove ‘/wp’ from the end.

• Scroll down and click the 'Save Changes’ button.

If you type the site’s URL into a browser, you will be presented with an error message that says the site does not exist as you still need to move some files to the correct directory. To resolve the error message please proceed to step 2.

You will need to connect to your website using an FTP client such as FileZilla to download the index.php and .htaccess files.

• Login to the FileZilla application.

• Go to the public_html/wordpress/ folder.

• Select the ‘.htaccess’ file.
• Right-click on the '.htaccess’ file.
• Download the .’htaccess’ file to your computer.

• Select the ‘index.php’ file.
• Right-click on the ‘index.php’ file.
• Download the ‘index.php’ file to your computer.

• Open the ‘index.php’ downloaded to your computer with a text editor such as WordPad.
• Look for this line in the ‘index.php’ file:

require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . ‘/wp-blog-header.php’ );

• Change the line as follows:

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

• Upload the index.php and .htaccess files from your computer back to the ‘public_html’ folder.

With the files in the ‘public_html’ folder, the website should now load without the error message and ‘/wp’ in the URL.