How do I move my Joomla Website from one directory to another?

You may prefer to build your website in a test folder while you are developing your content and when your development is over, to move your Joomla website to the root folder of your hosting account.

In this example I currently have my example web site hospitaladvice set up in a directory called joomlatest
so that I have to enter the following url to see my site:

hospitaladvice.co.uk/joomlatest.

When I log on to my server I can see that all my Joomla files and folders are contained in the joomlatest directory.

Before you move anything just check that you are not going to overwrite any content already in your root directory and I suggest you make copies and backups just incase anything goes wrong.

If I had called the directory test then I would expect to see all my files and folders in the test directory.

I now want to move all my files and folders up to the top level, sometimes known as the public_html (check with your ISP - Internet Service Provider first) directory so that it will be directly
accessible when you type the domain name.

i.e. I want to be able to enter hospitaladvice.co.uk to see my site.

For this example, let's imagine you are using Dreamweaver, It is not dissimilar if you are going to use something like WS_FTP Pro (an FTP program).

If using a web development packages such as Dreamweaver, login to your server. You should see a list of folders and directories.

In your test directory you will see all the files that are required to run Joomla.

Select all the folders (some examples are):

• Administrator
• Cache
• Components
• Images

etc so they are highlighted.

Also select the files in your test directory (some examples are):

• CHANGELOG.php
• COPYRIGHT.php
• Configuration.php

The next step is exactly the same as if you were going to move your files and folders on your PC.

Drag all of the files and folders from your Joomla test folder to the new directory. In my example, from public_html/joomlatest to public_html. If you are using an FTP program follow the instructions for moving files.

Now you will need to edit some of the files to tell Joomla where it is saved.

You will see a file called configuration.php which you will need to open and make the following changes to it.

This file tells Joomla all the settings for it to be able to run correctly. If you are nervous about doing this then as I have suggested make a copy of your site first.

You may find my examples below are slightly different from your settings on your server but what we are doing here, is changing all references to our test directory and making Joomla look in the root directory.

Some examples to look for are:

your var $tmp_path might read:

/home/myaccount/domains/yourwebsite.co.uk/public_html/joomlatest/tmp

You need to edit:

var $tmp_path = '/home/hristopa/public_html/joomlatest/tmp';

To: var $tmp_path = '/home/hristopa/public_html/tmp';

You need to edit:

var $ftp_root = '/public_html/joomlatest;

To: var $ftp_root = '/public_html';

You need to edit:

var $live_site = 'yourwebsiteaddress.co.uk/joomlatest';

To: var $live_site = 'yourwebsiteaddress.co.uk';

Check that all the references made to your test directory are edited.

So now if you open your Internet Explorer window, you should see that your Joomla website is loaded and displayed when you type your domain in the address field.

e.g: yourwebsiteaddress.co.uk for this example

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