We built a website for a client using Wordpress. We used a testing server which always works well. Wordpress was hosted as a subdomain, i.e. http://wordpress.ourcompany.com. I have direct and full access to the server. In the etc/apache2/sites-available directory the file describing the site in question uses the final name http://clientsite.com as ServerName, our temporary subdomain (under which we have been building) is a ServerAlias.
When we were almost ready, we of course asked the client (who already had a website) for their domain login. We changed the DNS like always. It resolved, the site worked well. Although Wordpress kept redirecting (of course) to the subdomain-variant, we could enter the site with the full domain.
Now comes the culprit. I changed the Wordpress settings (siteurl and home) to match the new site. The front-end works brilliantly. However, the back-end is unreachable as long as the settings are in this way. The login page shows up, but just redirects back to itself. If I simply change the Wordpress settings (in the options table) I can log back in, but we want to rid the subdomain necessity (of course).
Things I've already tried (I'm not one to easily ask of your time):
- Clear .htaccess
- Clear my cache & cookies
- Different computer, different browser etc.
- Change only the home and not the blogurl value. Sadly, this corrupts some plug-ins
- Remove all plugins
- Comment some lines as instructed in the wp-login file
- Naturally, everything I could find on codex.wordpress
- Set the admin cookie path
So, brilliant collective mind that is Stack Overflow, what did I do wrong? DNS? Wordpress settings? Thank you in advance.