Have you ever thought about moving your WordPress website?  Better yet, have you ever thought of creating a duplicate or backup of your WordPress website to use as a clone for reproduction?

If you are a webmaster or domainer, chances are you’ve heard of WordPress and have possibly used it and if you’ve been around a while, you may even have several or many WordPress sites up an running.  Either way, at some point you may want to move or copy your website so let’s get going.   

Moving WordPress

WordPress consists of two major components which make up an actual website, data and files.

1. Database - is a database of tables that stores all of the content of your website.  This will contain every stitch of content on your website including users, links, basically everything.
2. Files – These are the actual files and directories (folders) stored on the server of your host.  A file manager is where you’ll find these.  Files are what makes your website look like it does and communicate with the database to display your website information within the confines of css and templates.

In my case, I have a small business website where I installed a bare bones, WordPress 2.7.1 with nothing but Maintenance Mode installed and a customized temporary landing page.  The objective is to duplicate or copy my website onto another domain name to save time.  Some may do this differently but I’m going to list my steps below how I do it.

Seven Quick Steps to moving your WordPress site:

1. Backup database tables
2. Backup and download WordPress files
3. Upload WordPress backup .tar file to new location
4. Change wp-config file (database access)
5. Import tables to new database
6. Run mySQL queries in phpMyAdmin
7. Update WordPress General settings

Step 1 – Backup WordPress database

While there are of course, many ways to do this I prefer going right into phpMyAdmin in cpanel and clicking on my wordpress database and then clicking on export and making sure all the tables are selected.  I use the “zipped” compression level and save it to a folder on my hard drive.  I like to call mine, Site Recipes.  So now I have a backup of the basic tables within database, now what?

Step 2 – Backup WordPress files

1. Go into File Manager and to the directory where WordPress is installed.
2. Select All the files – Usually there’s a checkbox.
3. Compress Files – in cpanelX theme there is button for that.  I use the .tar selection when it prompts me.
4. Download the file you just compressed into the same folder as your database tables.

Now that I have both a database backup and a file backup we’re going to have to put these both on the new server.  There are a couple things that you should have completed in order to move your website… like a new host or a new cpanel account or simply a sub-directory or add-on domain.  In my case, I’m moving this WordPress site from domain ‘A’ to domain ‘B’ so I have the necessary elements already set up.  These are my Cpanel hosting account and I’ve created a database with username and password.

Step 3 - Upload and Extract WordPress Tarball to location

Do not extract that .tar file you downloaded, simply use an ftp program or cpanel to upload it to your new domain where you’ll be moving the site.  On my hosting account with Hostgator, my files are stored in the /public_html/ directory.  This is the web accessible directory, (when you go to www.yoursite.com it automatically takes you to the /public_html/ directory on your server.  In there it’s going to look for an index file.   So upload that backup to the location of your new website and extract it there.

In cpanelX 11, you can do this within cpanel.  Just select the file and extract it to the location on your server that it was uploaded to, change nothing.  We uploaded to /public_html and that’s where we will extract it.

Step 4 – Change wp-config

There are three things in the wp-config.php file you’ll want to change, (This file is located in the directory you unzipped the wordpress backup in.  The three changes are: (in bold)

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘cpaneluser_databasename‘);

/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘cpaneluser_username‘);

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘DatabasePassword‘);

Cpaneluser – refers to your cpanel user login name which is a prefix followed by an underscore then the database name and username.  This information is needed to communicate with the database.

Step 5 – Import the WordPress Database Tables

Now that we have the files and all have been uploaded and extracted and we have configured the WordPress files to communicate with your database, we must now populate the database with the tables we saved from our site recipe or site backup.  Once we have the new database tables in place we’re going to have to run some database queries using the MySQL replace() function to change links within the database.  You’ll need to stay in phpMyAdmin to do this step.

Step 6 – Run MySQL Queries to Change the WP Database Links

First SQL querie we’re going to run is replacing the siteURL in the database.  Rather than looking for the exact table, just select the database we added tables to and select the 2nd tab, SQL.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ’siteurl’;

The next database querie we will run is going to replace the URLs within the WordPress posts and pages and stored in wp_posts.  Here is the querie:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’,'http://www.new-domain.com’);

Again, simply replace the old-domain with your new domain name leaving everything else in tact.  The last querie we will run is going to replace links within posts or internal links.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’);

Now that all the links are changed within wordpress, we are almost done.

Step 7 – Change your WordPress General Settings

Login to your WordPress now under:   yourdomain.com/wp-admin and go to settings, general and change the information in there including your email address and the name of your website.

That’s it!  Your new wordpress site should be up and running.  Below are several links to other methods of moving your wordpress website that you may find helpful.

• Moving WordPress to another domain 9 steps
• Moving Wordpress To A Different Domain
• How to move WordPress site to another server with zero downtime
• Moving WordPress to a Different Domain

Today I’d like to blog about Akismet and the Akismet key provided by Wordpress. Before I get into that though, I’d like to say that up until this time, I’ve been a great fan of Joomla and still am. I started building websites with Mambo and when some of the members left and went to Joomla, I liked support and community members around it. Needless to say, I ended up getting very lucky with this domain name. So not all familiar with wordpress, I thought because it said blog and Wordpress was the most popular, I’d use it. Not only for the experience of using it, but for my clients who may ask for it.

Needless to say, I started using Wordpress from Wordpress.org but did not sign up with an account on wordpress.com. So, my first impression of Wordpress wasn’t all that great. On a daily basis, I was getting so many spam comments it was ridiculous. I had gotten to the point that I just discarded all comments automatically and was almost afraid to log into the justinsblog.com because of the number of comments I have to sift through and bulk moderate.

Anyway, I ended up doing a search on Google and found Wordpress.com and signed up and got my akismet key. I entered it into the little box a couple weeks ago and forgot about it. Logged in today and the only comment I had to approve was a legitimate one, (sorry I did not respond sooner Bryan). I hadn’t even noticed that the emails stopped completely.

So, this blog, which is long over due , is simply my experience with this Wordpress.org software, which is free to all. Use the akismet key and you’ll be glad you did. I was afraid to even log in with the amount of spam comments I had to moderate… while trying not to miss a legit comment that someone took the time to write.

OK, blogging is getting better. I hope to put more up here and now that I actually remember that this site is here, I think I’ll start using it. Thanks to the Akismet Key, I’m beginning to like this wordpress software. … OK, can I be done now?