Moving a website from a subfolder to the main domain

Sometimes a website is built in a subfolder, so it opens at an address like example.com/new or example.com/wp. When it’s ready, you’ll want it to open at example.com instead. In these steps, replace example.com with your own domain and new with your folder’s name.

Before you start

Make a backup of your files and database. If anything goes wrong, you can put everything back.

Step 1: Clear out the main folder

Your main domain loads from the public_html folder.

In cPanel, open File Manager and go to public_html.
Turn on Show Hidden Files in Settings (top right), so you can see files such as .htaccess.
Move any old files you no longer need out of public_html, for example into a new folder called old-site. Leave your subfolder (new) where it is.

Step 2: Move the files up

Open your subfolder (public_html/new).
Click Select All, then Move.
Change the destination to /public_html and click Move Files.
Check that index.php or index.html is now directly inside public_html.

Step 3: Update your site’s address

WordPress:

Log in to phpMyAdmin, open your site’s database and the wp_options table (the wp_ prefix may differ).
Change siteurl and home from https://example.com/new to https://example.com.
Log in to WordPress and update links inside your content with a search-and-replace plugin, replacing example.com/new with example.com.
Go to Settings → Permalinks and click Save Changes. This rebuilds your .htaccess rules.

Other applications: update the site URL in your app’s settings or configuration file, then check .htaccess for any RewriteBase /new/ line and change it to RewriteBase /.

Step 4: Clear the cache and test

Ruachost servers run LiteSpeed, so pages may be cached. If you use the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, click Purge All, then clear your browser cache. Open example.com and click through a few pages, forms and images.

When everything works, you can delete the empty subfolder and the old-site folder.