Migrate WordPress website

This post is part of my Your own Virtual Private Server hosting solution project.
Get the latest version of this article here: https://gist.github.com/9409150.

Introduction

This guide assumes that you’re going to migrate a WordPress website from one server to an other.

Requirements

• Ubuntu server
• Nginx
• Nginx minimal website
• php5-fpm
• php5-mysql
• Nginx php5-fpm website
• MySQL
• Increased Max Upload for php5-fpm website
• phpMyAdmin website
• WordPress website

Instructions

Export the WordPress wp-content directory from the existing installation.

Upload it to the home directory /home/[user]/wp-content on the new server.

Copy the wp-content directory to the new WordPress installation /var/www/[wordpress]/wp-content.

sudo cp -r /home/[user]/wp-content/* /var/www/[wordpress]/wp-content/

Export the existing SQL WordPress database with phpMyAdmin.

Import the SQL WordPress database export into the new database with phpMyAdmin.

Update permissions for the www-data group.

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/[wordpress] -R 

Update obsolete urls

In case you are going the change to url of the WordPress website f.g. http:// to https:// or http://www.oldsiteurl.com to http://www.newsiteurl.com update the WordPress database with a custom SQL statement.

Here is an example for url update using SSL only.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'http://', 'https://');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content_filtered = REPLACE (post_content_filtered, 'http://', 'https://');
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (guid, 'http://', 'https://');
UPDATE wp_posts SET pinged = REPLACE (pinged, 'http://', 'https://');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE (meta_value, 'http://', 'https://');

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE (option_value, 'http://', 'https://');

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = REPLACE (comment_author_url, 'http://', 'https://');

UPDATE wp_commentmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE (meta_value, 'http://', 'https://');