Migrated site redirects to localhost after successful login

Question

I have copied a site to a non-public demo server to make some edits.

I transferred the files and the database (having disabled permalinks beforehand), updated wp-config.php with the new database info, and ran a PHP script to replace the old URL with the new one in the database.

The index page loads fine (except for a few missing photos) but every single link results in a DNS error and a successful login redirects to a non-existent localhost folder.

I'm not sure what version of WordPress/plugins/themes as I cannot login. My site can be found at http://iamshawnrice.com/demo/casestudies/

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

All of your links in the menu are pointing to http://www.magnetmediafilmsinc.com/ which may indicate the search and replace script you used didn't do the search and replace properly/completely. The other links on the index page are pointing to http://iamshawnrce.com/demo/casestudies/?p=postID which I would expect to see.

Plugins and caches can also cause this problem. Make sure you disable any caching plugins prior to migration and if you are using a plugin to modify login behavior (e.g. Peter's Login Redirection or Theme My Login) disable those too. If you can't get it, this query will disable all plugins but it's a bit of the nuclear option...

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

If nothing is working properly, check your database again and see if the old URL still exists in the wp-options and wp-posts tables and also check wp-options to see if your original server path is present in values. If so, you need to change that either via a Search and Replace plugin or by MySQL query or by dropping the database and reimporting with a more comprehensive search and replace with serialization preservation.

If you change all of the values in the database properly, the site should move and work again.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue and found that when I replaced the filepaths, I'd included a trailing slash, i.e. localhost/sitename/ instead of just localhost/sitename

This picked up fewer instances than the correct search. Completely re-doing the search/replace and then re-importing to the database worked for me.