Moving house is always a pain, and in the eyes of most people moving a WordPress installation is seen in the same light.
However it doesn’t have to be a complicated and terrifying experience. Not with the right tools.
With BackupBuddy, I do such migrations on a daily basis, with zero pain. Here’s what I use BackupBuddy for (apart from backups of course):
- Migration of WordPress sites from a local server to a production server
- Migration from development to production servers
- Migrating WordPress sites from one host to another
So why is it so easy?
Well, here’s how it goes. I start from the website I want to move, installing the BackupBuddy plugin on it, and running a full backup.
With that done, I download the importbuddy script, and place it together with the compressed backup file onto the new host. Then it’s just a case of running the importbuddy script in the browser and following the steps in the wizard.
Job done! How bad was that?
Download BackupBuddy and do an easy migration
This is hands down the easiest method I know of for moving a WordPress installation. It works beautifully, and I’m honestly surprised that people still use the longer and riskier manual methods for moving their WordPress sites.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-JJoW9lJIA[/youtube]
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5 Responses
Thanks for the quick reply.
And for the reference to the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin. Have you ever come across ServerPress (“http://serverpress.com/”)? They seem to do something similar to this migrate plugin you mention.
Furthermore, I do believe you think too easy on the issue I mention. Just copying or moving the database won’t solve the problem because the database will often contain both the site data as well as the settings stored by the theme and plugins used. In my experience, it is especially this combination of both sets of data that makes this issue cumbersome and not so easy to solve.
ServerPress is a good product but I haven’t used it myself lately, so I can’t comment much on that one.
You don’t need to migrate all the database, but only the relevant tables. I would try to keep things as straightforward as possible else it will be a very cumbersome process.
This talk by Mark Jaquith might also be relevant:
http://wordpress.tv/2013/07/28/mark-jaquith-confident-commits-delightful-deploys-2/
You would just move the plugins and theme in that case. Or else, you could copy over the DB from the live site into the production one, then go through the BackupBuddy process as described above. For syncing the live and production databases, there’s only one tool worthy of mention: WP DB Migrate Pro:
https://wpmayor.com/plugin-reviews/wp-db-migrate-pro-review/
Looks very simple indeed and would work when making a full duplicate copy of the source site.
However, how about merging the development and production sites for next versions?
Let me try to explain.
Suppose I successfully created version 1.0 of my site and deployed it using this method.
The site is running and collecting data as visitors and members and users add content and data to the production site.
In the mean time, I developed the new version 1.1 on my development site, tested it and considered it worthwhile to take into production.
Now, when I would just copy the development site to production, I would lose all newly added content and data, wouldn’t I?
How do you go about in this situation? Merging ‘code’ and ‘content’ from different sites?
OR use the free plugin Duplicator: http://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/
Here is a tutorial I have done on how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdvOGV2eIjE