Migrate localhost to server

Question

Good day!

How do you properly migrate your localhost wordpress file to a live server? What I do is usually copy all my wordpress file then transferred to my website thru FTP and the database is usually imported to the target sql.

The problem is when I do this, the website layout gets all messed up. I wanted to migrate my website without the layout being affected.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the WP CLI too to rename your site's hostname safely and effectively. There's a chance that your layout is being messed up because naively replacing the domain name with a simple string replace, e.g. perl -pi -e 's/oldhost/newhost/g' backup.sql, will not take into account things like serialized data.

Try this on your local machine after install WP-CLI:

Using the db-checkpoint package:

wp package install binarygary/db-checkpoint
wp dbsnap pre-search-replace
wp search-replace --precise oldhost newhost
wp dbsnap post-search-replace
wp dbsnapback pre-search-replace

Now, take the file in wp-content/uploads/checkpoint-storage that starts with post-search-replace and import that to your remote host.

Without db-checkpoint:

# Backup your database here, this will be restored to your local once the
# operation is done
wp search-replace --precise oldhost newhost
# Take another backup now - this backup will go to your remote server
# Now, restore your original backup to have your local in a working state...
# OR do this:
wp search-replace --precise newhost oldhost

Answer 2

Make sure to also change the site URL in your database under the wp_options table. And it should work.

Answer 3

I always recommend https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/ to move your entire site. It makes the process really easy and also takes care of any database replacements needed during migration.