Have you noticed, there is all kinds of advise on the internet about the best way to move WordPress websites? There is literally a myriad of ways to achieve this. One of the methods I read on
wp.com was:
Changing Your Domain Name and URLs
Moving a website and changing your domain name or URLs (i.e. from http://example.com/site to http://example.com, or http://example.com to http://example.net) requires the following steps - in sequence.
Download your existing site files.
Export your database - go in to MySQL and export the database.
Move the backed up files and database into a new folder - somewhere safe - this is your site backup.
Log in to the site you want to move and go to Settings > General, then change the URLs. (ie from http://example.com/ to http://example.net ) - save the settings and expect to see a 404 page.
Download your site files again.
Export the database again.
Edit wp-config.php with the new server's MySQL database name, user and password.
Upload the files.
Import the database on the new server.
I mean this is truly horrifying steps to take, and I don’t see the point at all. This is how I achieved it for one my customers.
1. Take customer Database Dump
2. Edit the database searching for 'siteurl' with vi
vi mysqldump.sql
:?siteurl
And just swap out the values, confirming after editing the file;
[root@box]# cat somemysqldump.sql | grep siteurl -A 2
(1, 'siteurl', 'https://www.newsiteurl.com', 'yes'),
(2, 'home', 'https://www.newsiteurl.com', 'yes'),
(3, 'blogname', 'My website name', 'yes'),
Job done, no stress https://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress.
There might be additional bits but this is certainly enough for them to access the wp-admin panel. If you have problems add this line to the wp-config.php file;
define('RELOCATE',true);
Just before the line which says
/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
And then just do the import/restore as normal;
mysql -u newmysqluser -p newdatabase_to_import_to < old_database.sql
Simples! I really have no idea why it is made to be so complicated on other hosting sites or platforms.
