Note: Godaddy has been updating their infrastructure  so this hack may no longer work. It was a good run though.

Are you trying to stage your site before your domain name gets pointed over to your GoDaddy hosted account? Probably like me, you may be frustrated with how difficult it is to set up a staging area to view your site. And GoDaddy doesn’t offer this information, so hopefully this post will save you some time.  It’s actually easy to do once you know how.

First login in to your GoDaddy cPanel account. For this tutorial, we’ll assume you are using WordPress and have already installed it to your account.

Check the URL you’re logged into GoDaddy. It will look something like this: https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/cpsess1234567890/frontend/gl_paper_lantern/index.html

You will need this part of the GoDaddy URL: https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/

Also take note of this info in your GoDaddy control panel:

Open up your File Manager, then the wp-config.php file.

Underneath the PHP line at the top
* @package WordPress
*/

Paste the following:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”HTTPS://YOURTEMPORARYGODADDYDOMAIN/”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”HTTPS://YOURTEMPORARYGODADDYDOMAIN/”);

Next, replace the HTTPS://YOURTEMPORARYGODADDYDOMAIN/ with your GoDaddy link so it will look something like this:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/”);

Then add a tilde “~” to the end of the URLS followed by your account ID which in this example is j8a882820s. Follow it with a forward slash “/”

The links should now look like this:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/”);

Save the file.

If all goes well, you should be able to go to the link and view your temporary WordPress site: https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net:2083/~j8a882820s/

https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net:2083/~j8a882820s/wp-admin should also work fine to login and continue updating your WordPress site.

Once you take your site live, make sure to remove the two lines from your wp-config.php file otherwise your website will redirect to the staging area.

For temporary URLs for add on domains, add the subfolder to the link. Example:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/myotherdomain.com”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/myotherdomain.com”);

*Note these links are fake and don’t work. They are just for examples for this tutorial.