Moving a WordPress Site Content to a New Installation

About a year and a half ago I started fresh with a new personal/professional website.  I installed WP on a subfolder called dev on my server.  I worked on the site and got it to a good place to launch.  I called my web host to get some help with that as I usually do.  There were some issues… I’ve done this before with other web hosts and the easiest way I’ve done is to go into the WP settings?General and change the URL of the site to wherever you’re going to move it, then on the server, move those files.  Some of your image links will be broken but there is a find & replace type plugin to repair that.

This time I wanted to just start with a new WP install because the one I’ve been on has been buggy:

  • Related posts weren’t working
  • Some template files would come up blank
  • Some plugins that I use often weren’t functioning properly or at all
  • The admin bar would disappear on pages other than the home page.

Getting a Clean WordPress and Moving Content Over

  1. Tools> Export my sites content
  2. Go to my live site and under Settings> General change the URL to hhogan.com/backup
  3. Move the WP folders and files into a folder on the root called “backup”
  4. Install a new version of WordPress on my site root (my host uses fantastico with one click install)
  5. Import site content.
  6. Wow!  It worked really well.  All my posts are there but the media is missing.
  7. Move the media from the wp-content/uploads folder on the old site into  the wp-content/uploads on the new site
  8. Run Add From Server plugin to make the media library recognize the new uploads.
  9. Done.  This actually only took about an hour.  I’m pretty stoked that it worked at all.
  10. Well, slight problem.  I copied over all of the various sized versions of images (auto-done by cyclone slider plugin) so I have a lot of multiple images… but I’m just deleting those by hand,