WordPress has two options on the General > Settings page, which often confuse new site owners; “WordPress Adress (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)”.
These settings are automatically populated from the WordPress installation process.
WordPress Address (URL) Setting
The WordPress Address (URL) sets the address of your main WordPress core files.
Sometimes people prefer to have WordPress installed in a subfolder off the root of their web hosting account.
It is tidier and you know exactly where all your WordPress files are located, especiall the configuration files.
Also, many larger organisations have a mixture of legacy and WordPress sites which may not play nicely together in the same root folder.
In the example above, WordPress is installed into a subfolder called “wordpress” and the WordPress Address (URL) is set to that folder, pointing to the WordPress bootstrap files.
This setting can be overriden by adding the following line in your site’s wp-config.php file.
define( ‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘https://zpdbranding.local/site1’ );Site Address (URL) Setting
The Site Address (URL) sets the actual public URL of the site – the URL visitors will need to use to access this website.
It’s not very pretty or helpful to see the “/wordpress/” folder in the URL so in this case we just have the normal domain name and let the previous setting WordPress Address (URL) do it’s magic in finding the WordPress site files.
This setting can be overriden by adding the following line in your site’s wp-config.php file.
define( ‘WP_HOME’, ‘https://zpdbranding.local’ );