Often times, for one reason or another, I find myself wanting to develop a WordPress site for a client in a different location than where it’s going to end up. For instance, the client already has a website and this new WordPress will be a replacement for it – so I can’t just plop into their domain until everything is A-OK. Or sometimes I just need a development location but I need the site to be live for collaboration with other developers not located within my network. So I elect to develop and then move WordPress and/or the newly built theme to the production server.
In this particular case, a client was wanting to move their WordPress site that I built for them from their in-house server to a higher-performing server that could handle more bandwidth. I always recommend hosting with Hostgator and they elected to take my advice. I like it when clients do that!
So here I was with the task before me of moving a WordPress site with many users and posts and quite a few utilized plugin. A quick search on Google for something like “move wordpress site plugin” yielded a plugin called Duplicator at WordPress.org. Sweet!
Today I gave Duplicator a shot and it was successful. It was surprisingly painless and the new duplicate site was humming in no time.
If your hosting provider denies installer.php from creating a new database or user for you, you’re going to have to create a new DB and DB user for your new WordPress install location. I almost always use cPanel hosting, so I’m giving advice for that specifically.