Moving Your WordPress Site

Changing web hosts? Restoring from a backup? Here are some items to check.

Files

FTP these folders to your new site:

• wp-content/plugins
• wp-content/themes
• wp-content/uploads

Of course, you might choose instead to manually install the plugins and your theme. You might even load your images from a CDN and not need the uploads folder. But in general, these are what you will want to move.

Database Backup

Export your site database with PHPMyAdmin from the old site. Typically this is as easy as going into “PHPMyAdmin” (your web host should provide this tool in CPanel), clicking the export tab, then clicking the button. I do recommend checking the “drop table” box and unchecking “if not exists.” What this does will completely remove all old data when installing the new data.

Then simply import the site database from the import tab in PHPMyAdmin; select the script file and away you go. Just make sure to select the database for your WordPress site (clicking the link at the far left, usually “wrdp” is part of the name) or you will get an error message.

How to Change Your Site URL

If your site name is changing—perhaps from test.mysite.com to mysite.com or from oldsitename.com to newsitename.com—then you will have additional steps. See Changing Your WordPress Site URL.