Mowing site to another domain in simplest way

Question

I need to move my simple Wordpres site from www.mysite.oldplace.com to www.oldplace.com in most as possible simple and native way. My simple site specification: WP 4.4.2 Twenty Twelve 1.9 theme Polylang plugin 1.8.4

I know that I can install some plugins that might do this job, but I'm not sure they really does this job well. I have heard something regarding searching and replacing site name in SQL backup/restore script. But I beleave that in our days this somehow should be solved with native WP tools. Please, describe me les paint full approach to this problem.

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's nothing native in WordPress to handle searching and replacing your domain name across all your posts, options, etc.

The closest you can get is WP-CLI's search-replace command. It's not an official WordPress project, but it has quite a high adoption rate, it's very well maintained and available by default or on demand on many hosting platforms:

wp search-replace 'http://old-site.org' 'http://new-site.org'

Another popular option is this database search and replace script which, just like WP-CLI, correctly handles serialized data, which is important for WordPress because many options and meta values are stored as serialized arrays.

Answer 2

You are probably going to need to copy everything to the new domain first if your host uses separate folders for sub domains. The least painful way of doing this is directly on the database, provided you are comfortable using phpmyadmin. You can find and replace on each table using a mysql query and the query option in phpmyadmin:

update [table_name] set [field_name] = replace([field_name],'[string_to_find]','[string_to_replace]');

examples:

update wp_options set option_value = replace(option_value,'mysite.oldplace.com','oldplace.com');

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'mysite.oldplace.com','oldplace.com');

update wp_postmeta set meta_value = replace(meta_value,'mysite.oldplace.com','oldplace.com');

The above queries should take care of the basic requirements to move your site. Plugins that create their own tables will need to edited in your wordpress backend.