Transferring Development Wordpress To Live Wordpress Without Issues

Question

I am looking for a way to port one wordpress install across to another site.

For example, say I have:

development.example.com 
example.com

I want to transfer everything from development.example.com to example.com

Transferring the domain name is always a pain for me and I am hoping someone can help me.

After transferring to a new domain and hosting, I normally have to go into the wordpress database into the options table and change two fields.

siteurl and home (I change these to my new domain name)

I can then run example.com/wp-admin and I will be able to login.

The above works fine on the basic setup, but the issue I am having is that when you have lots of different plugins all adding options and other fields to the database it turns into a bit of a nightmare.

I normally have to remove the plugin folder and reinstall them one by one, and then use a search and replace plugin to change all the options from.

search: development.example.com 
replace: example.com 

This all seems like a very long winded process considering when I build with codeigniter you only have to change the url in one place config.php and then just run a

cp -rf development.example.com/* example.com 

Could someone advise me on how they normally run a transfer with wordpress where all this search replace and login issues aren’t needed.

Answer 1

You have all the details on the When Your Domain Name or URLs Change section in the Codex.

For replacing links, the Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin works well for me.