Scott Werner

When inserting an image into a post, WordPress uses absolute URLs to the files. This plugin overrides that functionality and forces it to use relative URLs.
For example:
WordPress Default: 
http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/example.jpg
Plugin Override: 
/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/example.jpg
This is particularly useful if you plan on switching domains ever as well as reducing HTTP requests.

Relative Image URLs

Creates relative URLs for images when inserting into posts.

intuitart

<ul>
<li>Develop/stage in one domain, go live in another.</li>
<li>Backup a production site from one domain, restore to a test site at another domain.</li>
<li>Migrate from one domain to another with minimal effort.</li>
<li>Ease migration between stand alone and multi-site installations.</li>
<li>Ease migration between domain and sub-folder installations.</li>
<li>Switch between ssl and non-ssl sites.</li>
<li>Always present your content in an SEO friendly way.</li>
</ul>
We aim to achieve these capabilities with this plugin. The idea is to remove creator urls as content is produced, and play the current url when content is viewed. By default, WordPress saves the local url with content, and that makes it a challenge to access your content from a different domaim, even when you have a legitimate reason to do so.
This plugin makes your WordPress content adaptable in that you can present content from a domain other than the one in it which it was produced. It achieves this by saving URLs as relative URLs. At the same time it supports SEO requirements by reverting to absolute URLs when content is viewed.
In addition to moving the whole site to a new domain, you can identify specific domains as being related. This allows you to copy raw content from one related site and paste it into another. The plugin will recognize the related domain and remove it as it gets saved. Then it will display the absolute URLs of the current domain when it is viewed.
For the technically inclined, the plugin removes the get_bloginfo(‘url’) and get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’) parts of a URL as content is saved and inserts them again as content is viewed.
We use context and some configurable rules to determine when to apply conversions in both directions. Most of the time you can go with the defaults. If you have a situation where something doesn’t appear to work, let me know your experience (with as much detail as possible please).

Absolute Relative URLs

Awesome! Thanks for this plugin! I’m still asking myself how one could work without a plugin like this one? WordPress out of the box does not support staging or even switching from a subdomain-blog to a FQDN. Adding SSL support to pages afterwards would be a disaster without this plugin!



I’ve been using >Root Relative URLs for ages but that is no longer maintained and does not work e.g. with Google’s reCaptcha. This one is a great successor and does the job very well and even better.



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As of WP v.6.4.1 (2023-11) this still works like a charm. And I still highly recommend this plugin!



A hint to people having trouble understanding what this plugin does: It will remove the base url from links when saving e.g. a page and adds it back when being loaded or viewed.



That means: After you activated it, it will do nothing.



This is a nice behavior, because the plugin doesn't know what you want. And instead of trying to do magic that might fail, you have to update your content by yourself.



This can either be done by re-saving every page/post manually or by using  your DB tool and doing a simple string replacement that removes the base url from internal links like this:



update wordpress.wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'https://www.example.com','') where post_content like '%https://www.example.com%';



And in fact, you won't see a change on your page or post and this is good. It's just important that you get rid of the absolute URLs in the database to be able to do staging, migration etc. without any hassle.

Must use for staging, SSL sites and multisite-blogs

Want to host your Wordpress site from a different domain? This plugin will help!

Relative Image URLs vs Absolute Relative URLs