How to migrate a local WP installation onto Digital Ocean

Just use a utility like “winZip” to archive your wp-content folder (don’t bother with wp-includes and wp-admin) and then unzip it on the server. (You don’t have to zip it, but it’s much quicker to upload).
For step 4, I use a script by David Coveney, which takes care of serialized urls in the databse. https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/