CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpwordpress
Mrmisi
Mrmisi

Reputation: 47

WORDPRESS - Clone Website on a New Installation to Update It

We need to recreate our site from scratch. When I mean from scratch I mean we want to keep the same content (pages, articles, URLs and tons of media) and move it to a new WordPress installation with a different theme. A brief background to try to understand what the underlying problem is. The current site (the one to be copied and transferred) is HUGE. It has more than 1500 pages and 3000 articles. It is currently running on an old version of WordPress and an outdated theme. We are deliberately not updating WordPress, theme and PHP so as not to risk crashing and being left without a site (this has already happened in the past with another installation).

What we have done is to create (on the same hosting) a new, updated installation of WordPress (on another directory). This will be the new and definitive one. Then – when all is said and done – we should use the name of the first installation (but this will be another issue to deal with at the end). We decided to operate in this way because we want everything to be done as safely as possible.

Some details:

Objective: SITE 1 -> SITE 2

At the moment, we have already installed the new theme in directory2 and created the home page that will host all the pages and articles from the old site. We are not interested in keeping the plugins. Our aim is for the new installation to be as “clean” as possible, without the risk of dragging around old problems.

What do you think is the correct way to proceed? Again, the most important thing is that the links are not changed (so that the URLs will still work once the change has been made; I mean: domain.org/directory1/perma/link/article-written-in-the past = domain.org/directory2/perma/link/article-written-in-the past

Could the export/import tool do this job? How should I proceed to make sure that I don’t affect the performance of the new site? Is it possible to carry out a test with a few pages to see if this can be done?

Thank you all!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 62

Answers (1)

Iisrael
Iisrael

Reputation: 405

The first step is to create a backup of the existing site. You can do this manually, you need all of the site files plus the database.

However, Duplicator is a great plugin that will create a backup package that includes everything for you. One thing to be aware of is the size of your site may cause issues for the plugin do to server load, but its the easiest method. There are other plugins as well to help with migration.

Once you have everything you can copy it to a new domaon like dev.website.com. The installer from Duplicator will help with the url updates, but its pretty easy to adjust in the config file and database options table. If you use relative urls most things wont be an issue, but a simple find and replace in the database will easy update any absolute urls.

Once you have made all your changes in dev you just reverse the process by writing over the live site and your set. This is safe beacuse you have a backup of the live site from step one in case you need to revert to the current state.

Upvotes: 1

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