Move WordPress from Local Server to Live Site Manually

Teguh Arief

Sep 24, 2020

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Move WordPress from local server to live site manually.

There are many different ways to migrate a WordPress site. In this article, I will show you how to move WordPress from local server to live site manually. This process allows you to safely move all of your site’s content (images, posts, and pages) as well as themes and plugins from a directory on your computer to your host’s production server. Step 1: Export Local WordPress Database


  1. Open http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and click on your WordPress database

  2. Click on the Export button from the top menu bar

  3. In the Export Method option choose custom

  4. Select all tables to export and gzipped for compression

  5. Press the Go button to download your database



Step 2: Uploading WordPress Files to Live Site Now open an FTP client and connect to your live site. And next select your local WordPress files and upload them to your live server. Step 3: Creating MySQL Database on Live Site


  1. Log in to your cPanel dashboard

  2. Click on the MySQL Databases icon which can be found in the databases section

  3. Create a database by entering a name for your database

  4. Create or add an existing user to the database

  5. Set MySQL privileges for new user



Step 4: Importing WordPress Database on Live Site


  1. Click phpMyAdmin on cPanel dashboard

  2. Click on the database that created earlier

  3. Click on the Import tab in the top menu

  4. Click on choose file button and then select the gzipped database file you saved in step 1

  5. Press the Go button at the bottom of the page to load your database



Step 5: Changing the Site URL


  1. Click the wp_options table in your database

  2. Open the page with a list of fields within the wp_options table

  3. Click on the edit field which options_name with siteurl

  4. Edit option_value, example http://localhost/test to http://www.yourlivesite.com

  5. Press the Go button to save



Step 6: Fixing Images and Broken Links by updating Paths For those who want to do it via SQL, here is a simple SQL query that should solve this problem:


UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'localhost/test/', 'www.yourlivesite.com/');


  If you have followed all of the above steps, then you have successfully moved your WordPress website from localhost to the live server.