This is a real simple process and but if you don’t take the right steps it can get ugly quick. In my case I staged the site in one spot then moved it to deploy, and these are the steps I took.
1. In the admin interface at the current blog location navigate to the Settings->General section. You’ll want to be here so that when you have moved everything over to it’s new location you can change the ‘Wordpress address (URL)’ to it’s new address.
2. Copy over the whole files structure to its new location (leave a copy in it’s current location for the time being).
3. If you have moved the database also, or it’s staying where it is but the file structure is moving server, basically if you need to change the host name then update the entry in the wp-config.php file. In my case I didn’t need to make this change.
4. Now you should be able to navigate to your new blog in a browser window.
5. Go back to the admin interface that you went to in step 1 above and change the ‘Wordpress address (URL)’ to its new location, hit save and it should make the change and redirect you to the admin interface at the new location. This step is necessary (along with step 1) as Wordpress does a redirect after every interaction and you could find yourself locked out and having to make this change directly in the database.
6. The final step is to navigate in the admin interface to Settings->Miscellaneous and change the ‘Store uploads in this folder’. I already blogged about this step here.
That’s it. The site should be fully migrated to it’s new spot and the old location ready to purge.
Tags: WordPress