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WordPress WordPress Theme Development WordPress Header and Footer Templates Porting existing headers and footers into WordPress

Posted by Charlie Guan
Charlie Guan
7,284 Points

Use echo home_url() instead of bloginfo('url') According to Wordpress Reference?

In the video, Zac talked about using 

<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>

to get the URL of the site. However, on bloginfo()'s WordPress reference page, here is what it says about using 'url' as parameter:

Displays the “Site address (URL)” set in Settings > General. This data is retrieved from the “home” record in the wp_options table. Consider echoing home_url() instead.

So instead of doing this according to Zac:

<h1><a class='current' href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>

should we use this instead?

<h1><a class='current' href="<?php echo home_url(); ?>"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>

I tried the latter, seems to work for me.

So the real question is, why does WordPress recommend echo home_url() over bloginfo('url')?

1 Answer

Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,649 Points
Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,649 Points

Hi Charlie,

The biggest advantage to home_url is it allows for a custom url scheme, what does that mean? When you enter you website url into the WordPress options page, you do so by pre-pending http:// to the start of it which is the scheme, the home_url helper function allows you to override this when you need a secure link (https://) instead of a non-secure link.

The bloginfo function doesn't do this, instead it simply returns the value that came from the input field which would result in a non-secure link being used. You can read more about home_url on the reference page using the below link.

https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/home_url/

Happy coding!