Moving Your WordPress Site

If you are changing your domain name or your hosting company, you may need help transferring your site. Its also a good idea to have your site running on your desktop or laptop workstation. That includes the database as well as the site files. If you created your own WordPress site using your hosting company’s one click install, you probably don’t have a local copy of your site. As a developer my building process always involves setting up a site on my local machine first regardless of the framework I’m using, so when a site goes live I am basically just migrating the site to the live server.

If it becomes necessary to move the site to a new server I am just migrating to a different server from my local machine. For a WordPress site all I need to do is make sure I have an up to date copy of the database and all the current files in the uploads directory. I always install plugins on my local setup first to test them as well as any plugin updates so I know my local files are always up to date. The same goes for WordPress core updates. If the domain name changes I have to run an update on the database.