Manually migrating a WordPress Website

Sometimes if you relaunch a design on a given website in your development system, you might want to finally bring it live in the best and cleanest form technically possible.

Usually I use WP Vivid to migrate my finished product to the live environment, but in some rare cases this caused problems. Just recently I had to to it manually after quite a few years and I thought it might be a good idea to refresh all the things you need to consider. So here is a quick checklist of things you need to take care of:

• Fresh installation of WordPress
• Export and import posts, pages and any (regular content) custom post types. Beware that in some themes or plugins like „forms“, „fonts“ or „colors“ or any other „stacked“ things you might be able to enter might be custom post types as well.
• Export these other content types like „forms“, „templates“ and so forth. Some might be able to export with the WordPress exporter, some come as a JSON, and some do not event offer proper export. Unfortunately, there is not a true standard right now.
• Export your taxonomies. Yes. In some cases, these might not be created after import. So make sure you have them there before you import the data or assign them manually.
• Recreate the menus (if they are small) or use a plugin if they are large.
• Copy the media library to your new server and install the plugin „media sync“ to sync all files back to the database. Be aware, that the IDs change, which might require fixing in the posts or pages. I feel like I could have done this part better. Should search for media library migration tools that keep the IDs.