Changing the name of the WordPress installation folder
If you’re wanting to change your blog address from something like www.mydomain.com/wordpress to www.my-domain.com/blog, this is what you’ll want to do:
Step 1 – Change your Blog’s Address in WordPress:
Log into your blog’s admin area, and go to “Settings” > “General”. Then change both the WordPress Address and Blog Address fields from their current address:
to what you want them to be:
You’ll see the warning message from us not to make changes unless you understand what you’re doing….but hey….that’s why you’re reading this tutorial so you’re good to proceed!
After you’ve changed these fields, click “save changes” on the bottom of that page. Doing so will kick you out of your WordPress admin area and give you an error message and make your blog look goofy. That’s ok, don’t worry, that’s what’s supposed to happen.
It looks bad now, but don’t worry, we’ll get your blog back!
Step 2 – Change the directory folder name
Don’t know FTP credentialsNext, use your FTP program, or a web based file manager, to RENAME the folder “wordpress” to “blog” (That’s the change for this example; you might be changing yours from something else to something else). Before:
After:
Step 3 – Save Permalink Structure
If you are using a custom permalink structure, go to “Settings” > “Permalinks” and click “save changes” there. This should trigger your host to update the configuration file that controls your permalink structure.
Now you should be all set!
Congratulations, you did it! Your blog address is changed and everything should be just as it is before! If it is not, then feel free to contact us directly so we can diagnose.
Still no luck?
open that file in a text editor (not Microsoft Word!) like TextEdit, TextMate, or NotePad and check to see if the “Rewrite Base” and “Rewrite Rule” contain the exact name of your WordPress folder.
If it is different, change it to the new WordPress folder name you want to use and then save the file. 
If your WordPress installation is at the root level, then these areas should be empty and it should look like this.
Optional (but recommended) steps
- Update Directly Entered Links
If you had previously created any links to a location on your site directly entering in its url, then you will want to change each one of those to match your new domain name structure. So if you were linking to a page at http://mydomain.com/wordpress/cool-weddings, then you will want to change the domain name to http://mydomain.com/blog/cool-weddings
- Set up a redirect with your Host
To preserve any previously existing incoming links from social media sites or other blogs and websites, you will want to set up a 301 wildcard redirect on your old domain. Without this, those links would take users to a 404 “Not Found” page. A normal redirect will send any link from your old domain to the root of your new domain (“mydomain.com/wordpress/weddings/mary-and-joseph” would be redirected to “mydomain.com”). If you can set up a “wildcard” 301 redirect, this will send links to your old domain to the equivalent address on your new domain (“mydomain.com/wordpress/weddings/mary-and-joseph” would be redirected to “mydomain.com/blog/weddings/mary-and-joseph”). Redirects are managed via your webhosting account, so you can contact your webhost customer support for help setting this up.
