How to move your WordPress blog to a different directory?

Web Developers often comes to a situation where a wordpress website installed on a test location in your client server need to be sent live on to the Root Domain. I will explain it like this. You have your wordpress blog or your wordpress website installed in the location www.yourdomain.com/developer and once the development job is completed, you want to take it live on to www.yourdomain.com. You need not have to reinstall wordpress to the root. Here is what you need to do.

1. Login to your wordpress blog
2. Go to Settings > General Settings
3. You will see WordPress address (URL) and Blog Address URL. Give your current wordpress installation URL to the WordPress address (URL) ie…. www.yourdomain.com/developer
4. Enter the address of the new blog URL ie .. www.yourdomain.com to the Blog Address field
5. Click on Save Changes
6. Now Connect to your web server using the FTP and Copy the index.php and .htaccess files to the Root
7. Open index.php using any text editor
8. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’); to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files: require(‘./developer/wp-blog-header.php’);
9. Now login to the old admin URL www.yourdomain.com/developer/wp-admin and make changes to the permalink structure if required.

Now your wordpress files will be in the old folder having your blog in the root.