Move WordPress Administration to Different Server or Sub-Domain

Move WordPress Administration to different server and allocate a Sub-Domain for better security and higher performance tweaks of the front end. Please note that, this article on how to move WordPress administration is intended for quite advanced users – equally good on server-side work and works for WordPress – this is not what is popularly known as ‘Moving WordPress’. If the website’s URI is thecustomizewindows.com, in this guide, we will give you the idea on how to move WordPress administration on different server and as we need a clean way, a sub-domain will be allocated – suppose admin.thecustomizewindows.com
The real website, however will remain on the main domain, i.e. thecustomizewindows.com – we are not moving WordPress to admin.thecustomizewindows.com, that is quite easy and hardly requires 15 minutes if you follow our another guide for cleaning WordPress Database.

Why We Need to Move WordPress Administration to a Different Server or Domain?

WordPress, unless you are working from MySQL Table level, moving can be proved to be dangerous. The performance of WordPress Administration is quite pathetic and demands continuous computing resource – whether you are sleeping or the website is completely sleeping, it really does not matter, the increased demand on the backend can make the front-end to throw errors.

Instead of installing Heartbeat-Pacemaker for High Availability, if we can manage the backend; i.e. the WordPress Administration to move, it will require less computing power in total. Plus, the calculations of performance by tools like New Relic, will be more precise. It is needless to state that, the security will be increased.

How We Can Move WordPress Administration to Different Server or Sub-Domain

It is obvious that your database is on separate server or you are using database as a service. The reason we included this guide under Cloud Computing, not only under WordPress is solely due to the fact – these kind of risky steps are not possible with traditional system. Simply the DNS can fail. Failure of DNS Server is quite common than we usually think.

Obviously, you can test this method on localhost – traditional system will definitely work, what we are saying is of quite precision – traditional can fail as we are basically doubling the source which can fail. With very less pageviews, this will not an issue. Higher the pageviews and/or crawl rate, more these will show up.

We can do it from Apache2 Virtual Host configuration :

Obviously, your all configuration should match. Either you have to use the IP address or Domain / Sub Domain Name, you can not mention as localhost. Obviously, you have to move the wp-login.php to wp-admin folder on the different server. This trick is known, because many users uses a custom url instead of the default, we can modify it from wp-config file :

And on the same wp-config file, there are these :

And this for vars.php file of wp-includes :

Definitely, you can use another server for wp-includes, but we guess it will add more complexity and yield less advantage.

These went on wp-config.php file. But the moved wp-login.php file to wp-admin folder demands some changes :

Unfortunately our hack failed because we never considered a big part – the Ajax calls. We must modify by using some WordPress filters.

Internet Explorer, however creates a big issue after login. The easiest way to get rid of this is not to use Internet Explorer to login. Windozzz and Internet Explorer will not create any issue for the non-logged in users. Yes, there is ugly .htaccess way or complex .ini settings to redirect from the backend, but we think, this is probably better.

You have to manually update. Do not click the automatic update button with this setup.