I recently installed a Wordpress Multisite and have set everything up. The one aspect that seems to have severally lacking information is how to map custom domains to each sub-site (i.e. jcs.examplesite to joescrabshack). I did see there is a plugin that 1000s of people used to do this, but it hasn't been supported now with further development in 3+ years and seems to unreliable moving forward. If anybody could share resources or tutorials on how to map sub-sites to custom domain names, I would greatly appreciate. Do I need to have a separate IP address for each to redirect via DNS?

Thank you

I recently installed a Wordpress Multisite and have set everything up. The one aspect that seems to have severally lacking information is how to map custom domains to each sub-site (i.e. jcs.examplesite to joescrabshack). I did see there is a plugin that 1000s of people used to do this, but it hasn't been supported now with further development in 3+ years and seems to unreliable moving forward. If anybody could share resources or tutorials on how to map sub-sites to custom domain names, I would greatly appreciate. Do I need to have a separate IP address for each to redirect via DNS?

Thank you

• multisite
• domain-mapping

• I haven't tried this for a while now, but the docs say "In WordPress 4.5+, domain mapping is a native feature." Are you sure it's not on the dashboard somewhere? No, separate IP addresses wouldn't help. – Rup Commented Jul 12, 2019 at 16:49
• Rup, that is certainly correct. Not sure how I missed that, but it is indeed on a tabbed section within the admin panel. Thank you for that link! – TheDrupe Commented Jul 12, 2019 at 17:21

1 Answer 1

As you might already know, this is done via the Edit button for the site. That contains all of the wp-options table rows for that sub-site. I always go through that entire list (it is long) and change all occurances of www.example/site1 to www.mydomain (the domain name for that subsite).

Many plugins/themes store info in the wp-options table, so you have to check each entry in that subsite edit screen. Then bring up a few pages with the new domain name, and use the F12/Inspector and look at the network tab to ensure that all the requests are to the new domain name.

Note that you may also need to fix any old urls for media entries. I'd use a search/replace plugin (I use the "Better Search and Replace" one) to easily change all www.example/site1 to www.newdomain . Backup your database first, of course.