For this reason, most developers rightly choose to do all the nitty-gritty of WordPress development on a local server and later upload the finished website to the live server. Similarly, future updates to the website are done and tested locally before being uploaded to the live environment.
In this post, I’ll be going through the process of moving a WordPress website from a local server to a live server. This process allows you to safely move all of your site’s content (images, posts, and pages) as well as themes and plugins from a directory on your computer to your host’s production server. Obviously, there are a couple of handy plugins that can make this process a breeze, but it’s always advantageous to learn the manual process.
Pre-requisites
In this tutorial, I assume that you already have a WordPress website running on your computer. I set up and customized a starter theme specifically for this tutorial. The customized site I’ll be migrating is called ‘Sample site’ based on the Default Themes provided by WordPress.
I also assume that you have paid hosting with PHP and MySQL support. Fortunately, most hosting providers support PHP and MySQL. Better yet, many providers offer one-click install scripts for WordPress so you don’t have to go through the manual setup.
And finally, you should have FTP access to your hosting account along with a client program such as FileZilla FTP. You’ll be using it to upload the files to your host. Alternatively, you can use the File Manager option in cPanel but unlike FTP (Filezilla Client recommended), cPanel doesn’t provide a view of your local directory structure. Okay, with all of that in place, we should be ready to go.
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