How to change my site from example.com to www.example.com

Question

I know this is an obvious question for you guys, to get to the point, my site's URL is papayaleavestea.com

I googled for answers and have found in the htaccess file :

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~papayaleavestea/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /~papayaleavestea/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

does anyone know or explain those line of codes or tell me what can I do cause I'm not that great of a programmer(more like a beginner still). would still appreciate any advice or help i can get from you guys.

Possible duplicate of [Redirect non-www to www in .htaccess](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12050590/redirect-non-www-to-www-in-htaccess) — Muhammad Ali, Aug 09 '16 at 07:57
Why do you want that? Today its more common to make the url as short as possible. — Jonas Wilms, Aug 09 '16 at 07:57
well, @Jonasw let's just say that i have a client that want his site url to be www.example.com. — Kobe1234, Aug 09 '16 at 08:02
@AliIshaq - this isn't a duplicate of that even though the poster pasted their .htaccess contents due to the way that WordPress works as it will prevent htaccess redirects (causing a loop) if you mod the htaccess file to redirect to something different than the paths stored in the wordpress database which wordpress itself will try to redirect to. — Kraang Prime, Aug 09 '16 at 08:19

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '16 at 08:17

To change a wordpress base url from example.com to www.example.com (or vice-versa) is a bit more tricky than a simple .htaccess modification. The reason for this is that wordpress handles all pages and will redirect based on the path that is setup in the database.

The first thing you need to do to stop the redirection to www is open up the wp_options table in your wordpress database, and look for the the records where option_name is the following :

home
siteurl

And adjust the option_value accordingly.

After you have changed these (which should change the majority of the links and references to files/posts/etc), you should install a plugin to assist in bulk changes to the data as there may be posts which have not been updated (if you manually added a link inside a post, it will stay that way until you change it)

One good plugin that can help accomplish this is Velvet Blues Update Urls

If you have a theme that has custom fields, you may need to go through it's options and update any custom javascript, etc to reflect the change.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 09 '16 at 08:49

You can set ServerAlias in your virtual host conf. This works if you have the same content on different IP addresses or multiple domains on a single IP address.

/etc/apache2/sites-available/example.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /www/example
    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias example.com
</VirtualHost>

Using .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 09 '16 at 09:28

1.Access phpMyAdmin via your Control Panel. ...
2.Click on the MySQL database for your WordPress blog. ...    http://www.papayaleavestea.com
3.Click on wp-options.
4.Click on Edit on the line for siteurl. ...
5. change siteurl (papayaleavestea.com) this to (http://www.papayaleavestea.com) same home url 

if not work comment for me

How to change my site from example.com to www.example.com

3 Answers3