Need help moving WordPress to another server

  • I’m a relative newbie with WordPress and I need help moving my blog to another server. I’ve read the instructions but I have questions about them.

    Download a copy of the main wordpress files from your OLD blog to your hard drive and edit wp-config.php to suit the new server.

    What is meant by “editing wp-config.php to suit the new server”? I remember when I installed WP the first time, I had to fill out all of the database details. In this case, I will be uploading my old database to the new server (right?) so I’m not sure what details to put in on this step. Do I need to create a new database on my new server? Copy the info from my old database?

    Go back to your OLD blog and go to options and change the url (both of them) to that of your new site.

    Okay, I think I can handle this.

    Again, download your database (but keep the old one just in case), upload this new database and the copy of the wordpress core files with the edited wp-config.php to your new server. Thats it!

    How do I download my database? What is meant by “old” and “new” in this instruction?

    Thanks for your help.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • >How do I download my database?

    Use a database backup plugin. Also, I would suggest that you make a database backup through phpAdmin.

    Thread Starter thehealthyskeptic

    (@thehealthyskeptic)

    Thanks for your response.

    Can anyone answer my first question?

    #1: Edit the wp-config.php file with the database information (the name of the database, and the username and password use to access the database) of your new server/host.
    #2: Answered above
    #3: Old – referring to the current server your blog is on
    New – referring to the new server that you are moving to

    Thread Starter thehealthyskeptic

    (@thehealthyskeptic)

    Okay, I did something REALLY dumb and I’m hoping you can help me fix it!

    I changed the URLs as indicated in #2 and saved the changes BEFORE downloading the database. Now I cannot get back into my WP-Admin panel because when I enter the old blog address nothing shows up (of course, since I just changed the URL to my new address).

    How do I get back in so I can download the database file?

    Thread Starter thehealthyskeptic

    (@thehealthyskeptic)

    I guess I could just use PHPMyAdmin to download the database?

    As you can see, I’m incredibly new to all of this.

    If you have access to phpmyadmin, you can also go the the wp_options table and change the “site_url” and “home” values (rows) to what you need.

    Ok yall. I have been trying to migrate my wordpress website over to another server for several hours now and finally figured everything out!

    Here are the steps I took:

    1. Copy the home directory over to the new server.
    2. Create a new database and add a user to that database.
    3. Add the new database settings to the wp-config.php file.
    4. Export your database from the old server using phpMyAdmin to your local hard drive.
    5. Open/Edit the database file using WordPad! Update the url paths throughout the entire file to match the new directory paths of the new server in case they have changed. In WordPad, Go to Edit, Replace. This will open up a search and replace window. In my case I had to update the file path from home/gillette/public_html/gillettewyomingblog to home/gwblog/public_html. Once you update all the file paths, just save the file.
    6. Now import the file to the new server using phpMyAdmin.
    7. This is where I got hung up. I got everything working ok up to this point. When I went to my website, the main page loaded just fine and I could see all my recent posts. But when I would click on ANY post, category or link to another section in my blog I would get a blank page!!! So I finally figured out that you have to go to your WordPress Admin, Options, Permalinks, then make sure your Common Options are still set to the way you had them before on the other server and just hit Update Permalink Structure and WaLa! Everything is now working properly on my blog and all the links work. Hallelujah!

    I hope this helps someone. It took me several hours to get “my method” to work. There was no need to download the posts to any xml files or anything like that.

    Here’s my blog: Gillette Wyoming Blog

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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