Herein is the condensed version of installing a (WP) WordPress SubDomain GoDaddy Network on free or shared hosting. This process might be applicable to other shared hosting providers. Shared hosting is economical and will not provide the power required by higher traffic sites. When that time comes you can move to more powerful resources. This study was conducted with WP 3.5.1. You might also be interested in our article on setting up a local WP development site for testing.
Caveat: As of the publishing date of this article, free nor shared hosting supported wildcard DNS. That means the WordPress SubDomain GoDaddy Network described here will not support dynamically adding subdomains. For example, let’s say you have your main site URL as domain.tld and want to add site2.domain.tld to WP. You will have to manually add “site2” as a sub-domain of domain.tld using your domain’s hosting control panel, before it will work in WP.
Steps to WordPress SubDomain GoDaddy Network
- Set up your domain so that HTTP requests for www.domain.tld are permanently moved (HTTP 301) to domain.tld. On apache your root folder /.htaccess will need something like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(site2|site3|site4|site5)\.domain\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
- Get comfortable with backing up and restoring your WP database. I like wp-backup-db plugin.
- Read the WP codex Before Creating a Network
- Install WP >= 3.5 on your domain.tld file system. I recommend giving WP its own subfolder but running it from the root. Minimize your Network setup time by doing this before Network install.
- Confirm your main (first) site configuration by testing: can post, comment, add media, view media in posts, menus functional, permalinks working, user accounts if you will allow users to create accounts, login to Site admin, etc.
- Read this WP codex article on Network Install, and you are ready to edit wp-config
- define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
- Install your WP Network
- Login to Network (Super) admin
- Confirm your Network admin configuration by testing: admin bar links, all My Sites menu item links are working, confirm URL Rewrite configuration in Settings -> Network Setup, plugins network enable/disable, themes network enable/disable, etc.
- Navigate to your main Site admin, note differences from Single mode Site admin, ie. how has the Settings -> General page changed?
- Now you are ready to add a subdomain site
The Magic, or Work, of Adding SubDomains to GoDaddy Hosting
- Add your second site’s subdomain to your domain in your hosting control panel
- Point the subdomain at the same folder as your domain
- GoDaddy will add the necessary DNS entries to your domain’s zone file
- Other shared hosting providers that provide subdomains should do the same.
- If you would like to see the DNS changes hours before the majority of the general public, set your primary dns server to the name server for your domain on your client computer
- In WP Network admin -> Sites, add the sub-domain you just set up in your hosting account.
- Get busy building your second site.
- Repeat these steps until you have all the sub-domains you need.