As a WordPress Developer, I’m always creating new websites for myself and clients. Part of my workflow is I first create the website on my local development environment. I choose or code the theme, install the plugins I’ll be using on the live website along with some development focused plugins and I might also create all the main content I would want to seed the site with so when I go live, it will already have something for people to read.
Normally, this would mean I’d need to make sure I always change the URL’s in the MySQL Database when I migrate from my local development project to a live production server. I will also need to upload the entire package which includes the theme used and plugins used for the site.
Migration Made Easy with Duplicator
Using the Duplicator Plugin will seriously help improve your workflow since you won’t have to worry about searching and replacing the various url references in your project. All you have to do is build out your site locally, install the duplicator plugin, create a package which you can customize to exclude any files, folders & tables like the ones used for development purposes and then download the two associated files and upload them using an FTP Program like FileZilla.
About the Duplicator Plugin
It’s currently active on over 1 million+ websites and has over 1,600+ 5 star reviews. This showcases how popular this plugin is. It’s also a very well maintained plugin that’s actively worked on by the developers at SnapCreek.
Migration Workflow
Let’s break this down into a series of small steps. This way you’ll have a better understanding of how best to add the Duplicator Plugin to your workflow. This is the same whether you’re working locally or migrating to a new server. Any steps that might be different, I’ll make sure to make that clear.
- Install the Duplicator Plugin on your Local Development Project or Current Live Site
- Once installed and activated, create a new package and give it a unique name
- You can also choose if there will be any folders or database tables you’ll be excluding
- Then you will click the Next Button
- It will scan your System
- It’ll give you either a Good Status or Warn Status which you can get more info about
- If all is good, then you can click the Build Button
- If all goes well, you can then download the two files and upload them using FileZilla to the new location.
- You would then visit the new URL with the forward slash /installer.php after the URL.
- It will run through it’s process to make sure everything will work properly
- You would provide the information needed when prompted
- If all goes well, the migration will be a success
- Finally, you will need to make sure to remove certain files but that’s easy to do. Just make sure to visit your admin dashboard and you’ll see a notification towards the top. Click the link and follow the prompts to clean up any files that should be removed.
- Of course you should make sure that everything is working as it should by navigating your site and check your various settings.
The Duplicator plugin can also be used as a backup solution following the same process outlined above. You may also want to take a look at the video to see how I use Duplicator for both Migration and Development.
The Takeaway
So if you’re a WordPress Developer or simply looking for an easy way to make migrating from one server to another a seamless process, then the Duplicator Plugin is likely going to be the best option. It’s active on over 1,000,000+ WordPress Powered Websites and has a significant amount of 5 star reviews.
Hopefully you found this article helpful and the video that goes with it. As always, thanks for reading and feel free to share.