Paul Ligocki

How to Manually Migrate a WordPress Website

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How to Manually Migrate a WordPress Website

WordPress Logo

Old Site

Backup wp-content Directory

This directory contains all the

  • Themes
  • Plugins
  • Uploads

Login to your hosting server and create a zip of the wp-content folder

CPanel

Files>File Manager>wp-content compress download

Backup wp-config.php File

This file holds the configuration of how the website connects to the DataBase

CPanel

Files>File Manager>wp-config.php download

Backup DataBase

The DataBase holds all the pages, posts, users and configurations.

CPanel

DataBases>phpMyAdmin

Select the desired DataBase.
If the DataBase name is not obvious then refer to the wp-config.php (Old Site)
file as it will be pointing to it

Example: define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wp_wrdp9’);

Check All 
Format: SQL
Export

Backup Complete

At this stage you should have 3 files

  • wp-content.zip
  • wp-config.php
  • database.sql

New Site

Deploy WordPress Website

Deploy a new WordPress Web Site either manually or using any automated install offered by the hosting provider. As we will be restoring over the top of most of it.
How to Setup a WordPress Website on Debian Based Linux

Restore wp-content Directory

CPanel

Files>File Manager>wp-content

Delete: wp-content
Upload: wp-content.zip
Extract: wp-content.zip
Delete: wp-content.zip

Edit wp-config.php File

Update the following lines to point to the new DataBase

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress_db');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress_db');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'wordpress_db');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

$table_prefix  = 'wp_';

Restore DataBase

CPanel

DataBases>phpMyAdmin

Select the desired DataBase.
Again if the DataBase name is not obvious then refer to the wp-config.php (New Site)
file as it will be pointing to it

Example: define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wp_wrdp1’);

Check All
Drop
Import
Choose File
database.sql
Import

Go into the options table and modify field values for

  • siteurl
  • home

From: http://oldsite.com
To: http://www.newsite.com

If you are migrating the hosting only then skip this step.
If you are migrating to a new URL you will need to do a find and replace of all references the the old URL. All your images etc. are at this stage still being pulled from the old location

Manually

Coming Soon

Plugin

Velvet Blues Update URLs

Cleanup

Do not forget to clean up the old hosting environment.

  • Uninstall WordPress
  • Delete Files
  • Drop the Database
  • https://wordpress.org/
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

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