This post may be redundant, but it’s what I just spent my whole day figuring out, due in large part to all the information available being quite a bit out of date, especially in regards to the GoDaddy Interface.

WordPress Multisite is an amazing system, and I’m currently working on rolling it out as a network of sites used to lease area-targeted marketing sites for traffic attorneys. The issue we ran in to is the Domain Name Mapping. This is, effectively, taking the site set up in WordPress as mynetwork.com/site1 and masking the url to be site1.com. You will need a few things to accomplish this task:

• A GoDaddy hosting account running an instance of WordPress MultiSite with at least two sites
• A domain name pointing to that WordPress MultiSite instance for your root site
• A secondary domain name that you would like to map to a different site on your WordPress MultiSite network
• The WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin

For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s say that I have WordPress MultiSite running on mynetwork.com, and I would like to point site1.com to the site found at mynetwork.com/site1

Install the WordPress MU Domain Mapping Plugin

This step is pretty straightforward. Download and install the WPMU under My Sites >> Network Admin >> Plugins, and network activate. There is a solid tutorial on how to do this here, but it leaves off with

At this point, you need to add a CNAME-record or A-record for external domain at your DNS registrar end. Since instructions for them vary from domain to domain its not possible to post all of them here! You can Google for help or contact your domain registrar!

Configure the A-Record in godaddy

Picking up where this tutorial leaves off, we will now configure the A-Record in GoDaddy.You will need to find out what IP address is hosting your main blog (mynetwork.com). It’s easy to do by just typing in mynetwork.com here, if you don’t already know it. Next, navigate to the domain you wish to redirect in GoDaddy’s Domains section, in our case, site1.com. The second tab inside that section should be titled ‘DNS Zone File’, and the very first subsection will be titled Zone File. There will be a link that says ‘Add Record’. Click on that, and select ‘A (Host)’ from the dropdown. In the box that says ‘Host’, put just the @ symbol, and in the ‘Points To’ box, paste the IP address for mynetwork.com. You can leave the TTL to the default (1 hour at time of writing). Save this record. Note: You will also need to delete any other records in that section which use @ for their host, which normally are pointing to one of GoDaddy’s default landing pages.

At this point, everything should be set up correctly, and if you go to site1.com, you should be presented with what is stored at mynetwork.com/site1.

Troubleshooting: When you go to site1.com, does your domain name keep changing to mynetwork.com/site1? The redirection is clearly working correctly, or you would have gone straight to mynetwork.com. Check and make sure that the checkbox for ‘Is Primary’ is checked in the Domains settings section for that site. That one took a little while for me to track down.

This is mostly notes to myself in case I need to do this again, but if you have any questions or comments, feel free to express yourself below :)