Relative URLs in WordPress

Question

I ve always found it frustrating in WordPress that images  files  links  etc  are inserted into WordPress with an absolute URL instead of relative URL  A relative url is much more convenient for switching domain names  changing between http and https etc  Today I discovered that if you define WP CONTENT URL with a relative url then when you insert files into posts they use the relative url for the src instead of absolute url  Just what I ve always wanted  But the official WordPress documentation says that you should use a full URI if you are defining WP CONTENT URL   WordPress codex says      Set WP CONTENT URL to the full URI of this directory  no trailing   slash   e g   define   WP CONTENT URL    http   example blog wp-content       Everything seems to work fine when I use a relative URL  e g   define   WP CONTENT URL     my-content-folder      But is there some problem with using a relative URI  I m just thinking that there must be a reason for WordPress stating that it should be defined with a full URI

User · Answer

I agree with Rup  I guess the main reason is to avoid confusion on relative paths  I think wordpress can work from scratch with relative paths but the problem might come when using multiple plugins  how the theme is configured etc    I ve once used this plugin for relative paths  when working on testing servers      Root Relative URLs   Converts all URLs to root-relative URLs for hosting the same site on multiple IPs  easier production migration and better mobile device testing

User · Answer

I solved it in my site making this in functions php  add action  template redirect    start buffer    add action  shutdown    end buffer   999    function filter buffer  buffer         buffer   replace insecure links  buffer       return  buffer    function start buffer        ob start  filter buffer       function end buffer        if  ob get length    ob end flush       function replace insecure links  str         str   str replace   array  http   www yoursite com     https   www yoursite com      array             str       return apply filters  rsssl fixer output    str        I took part of one plugin  cut it into pieces and make this  It replaced ALL links in my site  menus  css  scripts etc   and everything was working

User · Answer

There is an easy way  Instead of  pagename  use index php pagename  or if you don t use permalinks do the following    Post  index php p 123   Page  index php page id 42   Category  index php cat 7   More information here    http   codex wordpress org Linking Posts Pages and Categories

User · Answer

lt  php wp make link relative   link     gt         Convert full URL paths to relative paths         Removes the http or https protocols and the domain  Keeps the path     at the beginning  so it isn t a true relative link  but from the web root base         Reference  Wordpress Codex

User · Answer

What i think you do is while you change domain names  the sql dump file that you have you can replace all instances of old domain name with new one  This is only option available as there are no plugins that will help you do this    This is quickest way

User · Answer

I think this is the kind of question only a core developer could should answer  I ve researched and found the core ticket  17048  URLs delivered to the browser should be root-relative  Where we can find the reasons explained by Andrew Nacin  lead core developer  He also links to this  wp-hackers  thread  On both those links  these are the key quotes on why WP doesn t use relative URLs   Core ticket         Root-relative URLs aren t really proper   path  might not be WordPress  it might be outside of the install  So really it s not much different than an absolute URL    Any relative URLs also make it significantly more difficult to perform transformations when the install is moved  The find-replace is going to be necessary in most situations  and having an absolute URL is ironically more portable for those reasons    absolute URLs are needed in numerous other places  Needing to add these in conditionally will add to processing  as well as introduce potential bugs  and incompatibilities with plugins         wp-hackers  thread        Relative to what  I m not sure  as WordPress is often in a subdirectory  which means we ll   always need to process the content to then add in the rest of the path  This   introduces overhead    Keep in mind that there are two types of relative URLs  with and without the   leading slash  Both have caveats that make this impossible to properly   implement    WordPress should  and does  store absolute URLs  This   requires no pre-processing of content  no overhead  no ambiguity  If you   need to relocate  it is a global find-replace in the database         And  on a personal note  more than once I ve found theme and plugins bad coded that simply break when WP CONTENT URL is defined  They don t know this can be set and assume that this is true  WP URL wp-content WhatEver  and it s not always the case  And something will break along the way     The plugin Relative URLs  linked in edse s Answer   applies the function wp make link relative in a series of filters in the action hook template redirect  It s quite a simple code and seems a nice option

User · Answer

should use get home url    then your links are absolute  but it does not affect if you change the site url

User · Answer

Under Settings   gt  Media  there s an option for  Full URL-path for files   If you set this to the default media directory path   wp-content uploads  instead of blank  it will insert relative paths e g    wp-content uploads 2020 06 document pdf   I m not sure if it makes all links relative  e g  to posts  but at least it handles media  which probably is what most people are worried about

[wordpress] Relative URLs in WordPress

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