This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

WP Hydra

Description

WP Hydra has a quite straightforward purpose. Say you have a WordPress site, hosted on example.com. You’ve also purchased example.net and example.org, and you want them to also use the same website (the same installation), but to persist with that particular domain to have a consistent user experience. In other terms, you want your WordPress installation to be resolved and browsed at multiple domains. WP Hydra can help you with this.

Pointing multiple URLs to the same website is a good way to direct traffic to your site from several different domain names. You can accomplish this in two ways: either redirect one of the URLs to your primary domain, or park the domains, which point these domains towards your primary domain.

A redirect occurs when typing a web address in the address bar sends a visitor to another website (or URL), different from the one typed in. If this is your preferred case, then WP Hydra will not be of any need to you.

Parking a domain does the same thing as a redirect, except that the website name shown on the address bar does not change. You can park several domains to the same page. They have to be registered with a valid domain registrar before you can park them. Also, you’ll need to make sure the nameservers are the same as your primary domain (the domain that you are pointing towards).

Once your multiple domains point to the same website, you have to activate the plugin. No additional configuration or setup is required. This will make sure that the css, js, images and links that are leading to the original domain are now leading to the domain that you’re currently viewing. This will assure that the users remain on the site that they’ve originally visited, providing consistent experience.

Configuration

You only need to make sure that your multiple domains point to the same hosting, and to the same physical location on your hosting account.

Once this is done, simply install and activate the plugin – no additional configuration is needed.

Further customization – filters

If you have some custom content and you want the URLs within it to support multiple domains, you can use the wp_hydra_content filter, like this:

// we assume that you have some content in $content
$content = apply_filters( 'wp_hydra_content', $content );

If you have some custom URLs somewhere and you want them multiple domains, you can use the wp_hydra_domain filter, like this:

// we assume that you have some content in $content
$url = apply_filters('wp_hydra_domain', $url);

Further customization for developers

Since the $wp_hydra object is global, you can easily unhook any of the default functionality by simply calling remove_action() or remove_filter on it. The following example will remove the WP Hydra behavior of the content, but only for the_content() calls on the archive page:

add_action( 'wp_loaded', 'some_example_here' );
function some_example_here() {
    global $wp_hydra;
    if( is_archive() ) {
        remove_filter( 'the_content', array( $wp_hydra, 'setup_content' ) );
    }
}

Installation

  1. Install WP Hydra either via the WordPress.org plugin directory, or by uploading the files to your server.
  2. Activate the plugin.
  3. That’s it. You’re ready to go!

Reviews

October 14, 2020
Works great if you want to park domains with content of main domain (While keeping URL of alias/parked domain) Combined with domain pointers of Directadmin. And probably with PARKED/alias domain in cPANEL. Thank you
December 8, 2017
I needed a way to make a website accessible from two different domains. After installing the plugin, everything worked out of the box. Great work, thanks 🙂
September 18, 2017
I've been using this plugin for more than a year now and I had no problems, no errors or compatibility issues. I have connected more than three domains to the same website. The fonts are loaded correctly as well.
September 3, 2016
I have never faced such great support before, especially with a freeware plugin. Author spent some hours on helping me and patiently explaining how to resolve my issues. That's something you don't see every day.
Read all 10 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“WP Hydra” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “WP Hydra” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.2

  • Tested with WordPress 5.0 and 5.1.
  • Improved Travis CI config.
  • Improved Scrutinizer CI config.
  • Made plugin fully compatible with WordPress Coding Standards.
  • Fixed tests framework.
  • Improved tests.
  • Implemented Codecov.

1.1

  • Tested with WordPress 4.5.
  • Implemented Scrutinizer CI
  • Made plugin compatible with WordPress Coding Standards
  • Added composer.json
  • Various code improvements
  • Implemented a unit test suite and a complete set of tests
  • Implemented Travis CI

1.0.4

  • Tested with WordPress 4.4.

1.0.3

  • Tested with WordPress 4.3.

1.0.2

  • Fixing IIS compatibility issues.

1.0.1

  • Support both http and https together.

1.0

  • Initial version.