I had an old site built with flat html files. Then I installed a new site in wordpress as a subfolder on the old site, with the intent of switching over and going “live” when I’m done.

During development, I decided to follow the prevailing instructions for “going live” without moving the files (not moving the files seems important to people) entailing changing settings–>general site address subdirectory to root, then moving the index.php to the root, then editing the index.php to change the wp-blog-header.php

But the procedure made a mess, and I had to quickly restore everything. I was in no mood to debug the process.

So instead I tried another method, which worked! Why, anyway, is it so awful to “move the wordpress files”? Moving the wordpress files to the root directory turned out to be simpler. I’d recommend it to anybody who doesn’t mind having their wordpress files in the root (it makes the root cluttered, but that’s the only drawback.)

Here’s the procedure:

1. Make sure first that you have all the pages in, the navigation working, that none of the links contain “/wordpress/” in the URL.
2. Move or delete all of the directories and files from the old site: Every .htm file, every .inc file, every .css file, .tmpl file.
3. Move or delete all of the files in the public_html directory except wp-config.php and favicon files
4. Change both urls in wordpress general settings to remove wordpress
5. Move all of the files in the wordpress directory to the public_html directory
6. Verify that you can see your site and your wordpress admin