One of our readers Simon, asked a wonderful question from us that how can one move a locally installed blog on to a live blog? I can only say thanks to Simon for asking this question as this is indeed one of the common practices of launching blogs with content present on them.
Why will someone install a blog locally and then move it ?
Before I answer the original question, I would like to answer this question as well. There are many people who may be wondering that why not do it straight on live web server ?
1. It’s difficult to keep things private on the web, no matter what you do, you’ll find that people will reach to your blog even if you may not have done any marketing and there may be situations where you may not want to expose things to any of the visitors until your official launch.
2. Flawless things always looks good – The reason to install WordPress locally is that it can be used to create the web server environment and then things can be tested accordingly. And if you launch with tried and tested things then it looks more professional.
3. Faster environment – No matter what kind of internet speed you may have, it will always run slower than your own computer. There are cases where webmaster create the content and then launch the website with all the content, so it will save lot of time, if the webmaster does all that locally and just ports the whole thing online.
By the way, in case you don’t know that how can you install wordpress locally on a macintosh, then you are not out of luck. I’ve already written an article on that – how to install wordpress locally on mac os x and now going back to the old question -
How can one move a local wordpress copy to a live a blog -
1. Upload all the files to the desired location – After you’ve used installed desired theme, plugins and any other customization which you may have done, you wouldn’t want to do that again. Simply, upload all the files of a WordPress installation (local) to the live web server.
2. Export/import the WXR file – not the best solution though – WordPress allows you to export the posts, comment, categories in an WXR file and lets you easily import it too. So, either you can take this route or you can take the other slightly advanced route. Well, this solution is definitely possible, however it’s not the best as this won’t port any settings which you may have changed/enabled in plugins. You’ll have to do that again on the live server. Still those who are faint hearted, this is one of your life savior -
a) In WordPress Dashboard (local one) – go to Manage -> Export and click on Download Export file.
b) In WordPress Dashboard (live web server) – go to Manage -> Import and select WordPress and upload the exported file.
As I said that above two steps are more than enough to move a local copy to a live web server, however there is a slightly advanced but effective way of moving things as well. MyDigitalLife has written this excellent article, which tells you that how can you move WordPress blog to a new domain name. You just have to use this way [in this case the old domain will be http://localhost/ (in most of the cases)] and you’ll be able to move the WordPress from local installation to Live web server in a snap.
how about moving the database? your article doesn’t mention it but now my site says the ole ‘ error establishing connection to the database’
moving the database wasn’t in your 2 steps….
,rb
@richardb – well why would you move the database when you are doing an import of wxr file? You’ll need to edit wp-config.php to ensure that it is pointing the right server to avoid the error mesage of “error estabilishing connection to the database”.
Other than that, I’ve mentioned the link in the end, that helps you move the database in a slightly technical however, a very quick way of moving everything.
Thanks for all the posts
I’ve read into MAMP and can host locally, but do you have any posts for someone that has a blog that is LIVE already and now wants to host a clone locally to test changes?
There must be thousands of posts on this, but im falling short of using the right keywords.
thanks in advance :)
@jay – well, its pretty simple actually. In order to do so follow these steps -
1. Move wordpress blog.
2. change the URL of the blog using this guide.
It’s a mix of these two tutorials, in case you get stuck, let me know.
i’m having fatal error when moving my wordpress from local ( 127.0.0.1) to my hosting , is very difficult
its really not that difficult. Follow these articles to clone wordpress blogs or to make wordpress blogs live.
Thanks for the information. I was able to get most of my blog from local to live. However, alot of photos and other links didn’t get uploaded. I used the wxr import/export method as described above. Besides importing all of the stuff again to the live site (obviously a time consuming process) is there a way that I can now upload some of the databases of photos and links to make the live site same as the local one. I am new to this whole thing and don’t understand a ton of technical jargon
Thanks
just follow the links mentioned above your comment left by me. that should fix up your problem.