Migrate / Clone your website the right way
WordPress is storing its data into a serialised data format. This means you shouldn’t manually modify or alter the database or exported SQL dump. It will most likely cause problems (more on this topic here). There are better and easier tools that will simply make your life easier when migrating or simply cloning your website. Here’s a list of plugins recommended:
All in one WP Migrate (Clone or migrate)#
Download link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/
Video Explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yat8HfpY1eM
The plugin allows you to export your database, media files, plugins, and themes. You can apply unlimited find/replace operations on your database and the plugin will also fix any serialization problems that occur during find/replace operations. Basically this plugin will export the entire website (files and database) with just a few clicks.
WP Migrate DB#
Download link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-migrate-db/
Video Explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8oScnEK5y0
If you’re using a “zip website & export database” manual way, you should export the database using this plugin. It’ll properly search and replace any strings containing the old paths and urls adding the new ones. Do not export through PhpMyAdmin and manually replace strings! Use this plugin instead.
After migrating the website, don’t forget to access the theme’s options and simply hit the Save button. It’ll also refresh paths in the dynamic generated CSS . In some cases, it’s needed to also refresh the page builder data. To do so, access the theme options > Advanced and here hit the “Clear THEME Cache” eg: http://hogash.d.pr/3H7b .
Known issues:#
Jetpack Plugin
We had one report with a migration going wrong. The supposed fix for that migration was to disable Jetpack plugin and re-enable when the migration process is over.