Occasionally you will get a user who is interested in changing their site URL. This is a harmless request, but could, unfortunately, break their site if they try to change their domain within their WordPress dashboard. If you log into any WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > General, there’s a section where you can change your WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL). So to give folks the benefit of the doubt, this is very misleading. If we could remove this section of the WordPress settings we absolutely would, but there’s no way around it.
Let’s say a student or faculty member tries to change their domain name from wpdemo.labrumfield.com to test.labrumfield.com:
The user edits their fields to match their “new URL”, scrolls down, and clicks Save.
They would then be met immediately with the following error:
If they were to attempt to log in again, they would be greeted with a WordPress dashboard that looks like this:
There’s no real way to reverse the mistake and fix this other than to log into the user’s database and correct the site URL there. To do this, go to the user’s cPanel, search php in the top search bar, and then click phpMyAdmin. Click the database for the WordPress instance in question, and then click wp_options from the drop-down on the lefthand side. The first line should read siteurl and show the recently changed site URL. Click edit.
On the following page, correct the URL to its original name and click Go.
Now go to page 2 in wp_options. Click edit next to the home line.
Just like before, edit the URL back to its original domain, scroll down and click Go.
Now when you refresh the dashboard, all should be back to normal:
