WordPress is one of the biggest CMS platforms available. This means there’s no end to the number of plugins that are available that claim to all to the same thing the best, so how do you choose? The direct honest answer is a lot of trials and painful errors, but Design Cavern is here to take that pain away from you! Since we already went through all that trial and error we can simply pass on the knowledge we gained. This way you can avoid all the late-night web design driven tears. Now for the useful information! When we build for our clients we always do so on our own servers. Because sometimes our clients may not have a server or simply want to keep the old site live and avoid downtime which is reasonable but after completing the client’s site on our own servers how do we go about transferring the new design if the client already owns a server and wants to avoid decent amounts of downtime? Plenty of very time-consuming methods can be used I’m sure, but the best method that we use 100% of the time with our clients now is the WP Migrate DB plugin [PRO]. Why this plugin? Why the PRO version? I hear the questions and I’ll explain. With the basic version of the plugin, you can only transfer so much, but with the PRO version of the plugin you can transfer images, themes, plugins, the database and even pick and choose which tables from the database should transfer. You can seamlessly replace an entire site with a click of a few buttons.

How to do it?

1. The first step is to install the plugin on both sites. The one that’ll receive the transfer and the one transferring.

2. The second step will be to collect the 2nd site’s specific secret key to connect.

Once you do so it should look something like this.

Tip: The website that’s doing the transferring should have decent PHP.ini timeout settings or the transfer will fail if the site is too large.

3. The third step is to choose what you’d like to transfer from database tables, post types, replacing URLs, images, themes and more.

4. The fourth and final step is to press the button and watch your files transfer over. Once it’s complete and you see no change that’s probably because your database prefix is different than the site that transferred. For example, the basic WordPress database prefix is “wp_” If your website database prefix is “dx_” then simply change the prefix wp_config recognizes and you should see a change.