WordPress site migration addvice

First of all. You don’t need to use plugins in order to migrate some wordpress from one place from another.

1) Make backups.

When you have a backup with, for example Updraft you can easily make backup with all things, and restore backup.

2) Hard migration. Best migration.

I am doing this type of migration most of the times. Simply take whole your FTP and migrate it to another computer. Do export from the whole wordpress database.

Problems encountered:

  • when you migrate, you need to check .htaccess in order to make translation for you web page to correct folder. Mistake here will be simple. You will see homepage but everyother page will end up not found. Changing .htaccess solve this

  • Database adresses. Most common problem here is that you need to know how will your domain look like after migration. You need to go to wp_options and change site_url and homepage url in order to work wordpress right. Second problem here is that you need to find every entry in database where is old url and change it to the new one.

  • wp_posts table. When you migrate and old wordpress instalation with lots of posts, you will surely encounter problem with overflowing wp_posts table. You will need to add lines to database manually by a few lines at the time.

With this system i normally migrate huge webs from one server to another with no other problems.
Improvement here will be some sort of repository where you can storage whole website with database and just clone repository to different place. Very nice and work friendly is to make same users and passwords to the database on a different places.

Hope it helps.