Moving Day: A Guide for Moving One WordPress Site to Another
One of the best parts of WordPress is just how easy it is, not only to import content in from other content management systems, but to export and take all of your content with you out of WordPress itself. There isn’t the feeling, like with so many systems and web apps out there, that you are deliberately being locked down into using one particular system. And like anything, there is an art to moving your WordPress site from one location to another.
Why move?
There could be any number of reasons for moving your site to a new location. Perhaps you are changing hosting providers (as we all do at one point or another) and are moving all of your stuff someplace new. Most of the time, for me, it’s because I’m setting up a client’s site based on a local or remote testing installation.
A better question would probably be: why test? More often that not you will be moving a WordPress site to a new location because you first had it in place, testing it. And this is only smart. Live testing, where people know how to find it, is never smart. Testing it in secret can help you foresee and diagnose many of the potential problems, and help you save face once you turn it live.
In the 100 or so odd times I’ve moved a WordPress site from one location to another, I’ve casually put together a mental checklist that I go through to make sure I hit all of the points I need to, and to speed the process up. Consider this a mental brain dump, for your benefit.
