Recently, I migrated my word press domain from my earlier site (soaweb.co.in) to my new web site (naveenbalani.com). Here are the steps, I followed
- Exported my earlier wordpress database using phpAdmin
- Installed word press on my new website. Just copied the wordpress install files on new domain web root.
- Created a new database for the new domain.
- Imported the database.zip from Step 1 to new database.
- Changed the following 2 records in wp_options table which mentioned my old wordpress blog URL
Update option_value column with “newUrl” where option_name =”siteurl
Update option_value column with “newUrl” where option_name =”home”
- Changed the wp-config.php of the new domain to point to new database
- Logon to Word Press and change the path of uploaded media content files for future uploads to relative one. Navigate to Settings > Miscellaneous Settings and change it to Store uploads in this folder to / wp-content/uploads.This might be optional, but in my case the hosting provider had appended the complete path , instead of relative one.
I than did a search on my new wordpress blog table to find out references of my earlier url (soaweb.co.in) and found
there where still entries remaining in wp_posts table. The wp_posts table stores the revision history, if you have enabled it.I had enabled revision history, so I went ahead and deleted all my revsion history since I didn’t require it any more , using the following SQL command in phpAdmin
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;
Few other references (the guid column) pointed to my earlier blog url, so did a mass replace using the following command. The guid was the short url of the blog. This technique you can use to replace all references quickly.
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE(guid,”soaweb.co.in” ,”naveenbalani.com”)
That’s it, I now have my website up and running.
One of the things, I realized was that in my earlier blogs, the URL references and images was hard coded, instead of referencing them. This required an extra effort to move the urls to the new domain. Other thing, I noticed was, that I had used Rich text (imported my content from words), in that case the export didn’t handle the special characters well (like bullets), I had to change that manually.
I tried the entire setup on my local environment using xampplite environment and than moved it over to my hosting provider. Hope this would give you some insights if you plan to move your word press blog. And if you have been following my blog on soaweb.co.in , this would now be redirected to this website.
