A tricky thing in WordPress can be managing hostnames. When managing WordPress websites for multiple clients, agencies often encounter significant challenges related to hostnames and the process of changing them. One common pitfall is the intricate web of dependencies that WordPress creates around its site URL—links, media paths, and even serialized data in the database are tightly coupled to the hostname.
Changing a hostname can easily break internal links, disrupt theme and plugin functionality, and cause issues with SSL certificates. Additionally, DNS propagation delays and caching can lead to inconsistent site experiences for end users. These technical hurdles are compounded by the risk of downtime, SEO setbacks, and confusion for clients, making hostname management a complex and error-prone aspect of agency operations.
Airwp streamlines the process of adding and changing hostnames.
- We make it easy to add and delete hostnames, they directly associated with the, just on the right-hand side
- We use the notion of a “primary” name, this ensures you have 1 hostname for each site that is the primary hostname so that search engines don’t get confused and start to penalize your SEO metrics because of duplicate content
- All other names redirect to the primary name with 301s
- As soon as you add a name and you hit the site, security certificates are requested automatically, you don’t have to click anything
- The challenge type for the security certificates is “http” type, this means as long as you pointed the name correctly at our load balancers in your DNS, you’re done, no need to add special DNS records
- When you change a primary hostname, Airwp automatically sets both
homeandsiteurloptions in thewp_optionstable ensuring that WordPress itself knows the primary name
Changing hostnames happens A LOT when you’re a busy agency, so we’ve worked hard to reduce the number of steps required to get it done quickly.