How to change magento default admin url – Magento

To protect your magento website backend against hackers we recommend you to change the default url of the magento admin.It is easy to change the admin url from default http://www.yourdomainname.com/admin or http://www.yourdomainname.com/index.php/admin to yourcustom admin url

In the following steps we are going to see how to have custom admin url name of our magento backend

Follow these steps to change the admin URL/path.

Step 1 – Change Path

Open the local.xml from the app/etc/ directory and locate the following content

<admin>
<routers>
<adminhtml>
<args>
<frontName><![CDATA[admin]]></frontName>
</args>
</adminhtml>
</routers>
</admin>

Now replace admin from <frontName><![CDATA[admin]]></frontName> with your new admin url key.This should be something hard to guess,then save the file.I assume you has changed to <frontName><![CDATA[yournewadminpath]]></frontName>.

Step 2 – Refresh Cache

Now Refresh the cache of the site from the backend or you can mannually delete the content of the var/cache dir from your ftp.

Step 3 – Complete

You have done now.you can check by visiting http://www.yourdomainname.com/yournewadminpath (yournewadminpath is the name of urlkey which you gave on the step 1).

if you try http://www.yourdomainname.com/admin you will get 404 Page not found.

Note: Do NOT use the Magento Backend in the Magento Admin Panel to change the admin URL, as this is known to cause problems.