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.