Moving A WordPress Site To A Different Domain Name – Minkatec: Delaware Computer Network & Repair Services

Suppose you want to make a copy of your existing WordPress site on a different domain name (e.g. test.domain.com). Instead, maybe you want to move your site to a different domain name (e.g. newdomain.com). This procedure assumes you have shell access to the Linux server hosting your site running Apache & MySQL.

Copy the web directory:
```
cp -pR olddomain.com/ newdomain.com
```

Dump the MySQL database

mysqldump -l wordpress-old > wordpress-old-dump

Login to MySQL. Create a new database and load from the dump:

create database wordpress-new;
use database wordpress-new;
source wordpress-old-dump;

Create a new database user for the new WordPress instance:

CREATE USER 'wordpress-user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED by 'some-password';

Give your WordPress MySQL user permissions on the new database:
```
GRANT ALL ON wordpress-new.* TO 'wordpress-user'@'localhost';
```

Edit your new wp-config.php: enter the appropriate database name, username, and password:

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress-new');
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress-user');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'some-password');

Configure the new site in Apache: The steps here are different depending on your distribution. Essentially, you want a new site pointing to the new web directory. Relevant items:
```
ServerName newdomain.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/newdomain.com
```

Log back into MySQL and fix-up the URLs:

use database wordpress-new;

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://olddomain.com', 'http://newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://olddomain.com','http://newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value,'http://olddomain.com','http://newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://olddomain.com', 'http://newdomain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

That’s it! Open up a browser and go to your newdomain.com. You should check your site for any hard link references to olddomain.com in Pages, Posts, and RSS Feeds.