When creating a brand new site, or even if your working on updating your website, its very common to develop things up on your localhost and then move things on-line when your ready. That migration process can lead to some real headaches if its not handled well so this post aims to give you the best solution for this task which require very little effort for very quick results, so you can continue your project in no time.
Introducing WP Migrate DB
Typically, most novice developers would assume that simply exporting the database via phpMyAdmin from your PC and importing to your server would be enough – but sadly this requires the manual replacement of all of your content URLs and in some cases, such as with serialized data, things may not fully transfer leaving you with annoying patchy data which requires much time to re-fill.
This is where the wonderful WP Migrate DB plugin comes to the rescue.
The plugin offers a much more useful export of your database, which allows you to simply import this data into your new server pre-populated with the correct URLs for your images etc. Saving hours of laborious find & replace attempts.
To begin, install and activate WP Migrate DB (for help on this, please see here) – Once done you will have a new area within your WordPress dashboard under Tools > Migrate DB, this is where you setup the URLs for your new server/domain.
By default your are given 2 areas for the plugin to replace URLs, the 1st is your domain (which may look very different in your machine depending on your localhost setup) and the 2nd area is for your media folder, you can add more if you need but in most cases these 2 default paths should cover most WP setups.
To avoid exporting unnecessary data, you can also choose to exclude certain WP ‘fluff’ via the Advanced Options area – these include post revisions and spam comments, so it s a good idea to check these boxes before hitting export.
Handling Media
The only thing WP Migrate DB cant handle for you is moving your images and other content however this is a simple process of just uploading your wp-content folder via FTP so please bare this mind should you experience missing images when following the above guide.
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