Support Start > Web Hosting Technical Information > Recommended Software and Scripts > WordPress > Removing ".customers.tigertech.net" from WordPress links

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Many customers transfer their WordPress blog to our service from another provider, and need a way to test their site before they begin directing live traffic to it.

We give customers a temporary URL to do this, such as “https://example.com.customers.tigertech.net/”. When you’re ready to stop using the temporary URL, you can tell WordPress to use your permanent domain name without the extra “.customers.tigertech.net” part.

Update WordPress Settings

If you installed WordPress using our “one-click installer” and left our Tiger Technologies WordPress plugin active (or you’ve installed the plugin manually), your WordPress Dashboard will tell you when it’s safe to stop using customers.tigertech.net and will show you a link that does so:

Or, if you should wait a little longer before doing this, you’ll see:

What if I’m not using the Tiger Technologies WordPress plugin?

If you didn’t use our installer, or if you’ve disabled the plugin, you can manually remove “.customers.tigertech.net” from the end of the “WordPress address (URL)” and “Site address (URL)” in the Dashboard (don’t do this until you’re sure that your browser is contacting our servers, not the old servers, for “www.example.com”):

1. Login to the WordPress administrative dashboard
2. Click Settings, then General.
3. Change the "WordPress Address (URL)" to the new URL that you want to use (e.g., https://www.example.com).
4. Change the "Site Address (URL)" to the same value.
5. Click Save Changes.

This will cause every link that is automatically generated by WordPress to use the permanent version of your domain name, and that's usually all you need to do.

Fixing links with a plugin

In some cases, you may see another side-effect when building a WordPress site using a temporary address. When creating new posts or importing an existing site’s contents, WordPress will create links to certain types of files (including images) using the “example.com.customers.tigertech.net” site URL it knows about. When you later remove “.customers.tigertech.net” from the site's URL, those absolute links will remain.

Such links will still work, of course, because the “example.com.customers.tigertech.net” server name will always correctly point to our server. However, you may not want visitors to see that URL for cosmetic and branding reasons.

You can use a plugin called “Velvet Blues Update URLs” to fix these:

1. Be sure you've made an extra backup of your website.
2. On the new site, click Plugins / Add New.
3. Search for: Velvet Blues Update URLs
4. Install and activate the plugin
5. Click on Tools / Update URLs and follow the directions.

What if the plugin doesn’t fix everything?

We’ve found the “Velvet Blues Update URLs” plugin to be very useful and reliable, but if it doesn’t work on your site for some reason, technically advanced experts can use the command line shell to run this command:

wp search-replace example.com.customers.tigertech.net example.com --all-tables-with-prefix --report-changed-only

This is the same command that our plugin runs when you click to remove the extra suffix in the dashboard. It should remove “.customers.tigertech.net” wherever it occurs within WordPress. We’ll be glad to do this for you if you contact us.