How do I export an entire Wordpress website? [closed]

Question

I was wondering how to export an entire wordpress website. This includes all pages, the theme, any tweaks to the theme, everything... So that when I import it to another URL, it looks exactly the same in every way possible.

Answer 1

You can actually use the WordPress Duplicator plugin, check the link below:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/

This plugin scans your site and creates a backup of the WordPress site then creates an installer.php file. Download those files and put them on the new server. Run the installer.php and follow the docs to be up and running in no time.

Answer 2

There are a number of ways to migrate a Wordpress site.

Plugin route (easiest) With plugins I'd suggest duplicator if you want something pretty standard (like a single site with a pretty standard configuration...no multi-site or BuddyPress). And if you're willing to spring a little cash BackupBuddy works well too but falls short for more complex setups.

Manual route Assuming your site's url will stay the same you could just do a MySQL dump and move your PhP files from the root of your Wordpress setup. This tends to be buggy as Wordpress wasn't really designed to move in this way but with a bit of fiddling around you'll get the site back up.

I'd only choose this route if you're really comfortable with MySQL management and have at least a bit of a background programming PhP or else it could get frustrating.

Rebuild Option You could just reverse engineer your site. So imagine your server went down but you had backups of your entire site: exports, themes, plugins etc. You could just re-install Wordpress then use the Wordpress importer plugin to get your data, then tweak it all to make it pretty. A useful resource for this approach is Wordpress Codex article on Migrations.

Rsync route This one I haven't done myself yet but if you're extremely comfortable with your server environment and have root access you could use a tool like rsync to literally clone the server. From what I understand this is similar to how disc images work but I honestly can't tell you much more than that. I'd recommend checking out Rsync Documentation for more on that.

Answer 3

Usually, to backup a Wordpress installation you just have to copy the /wp-content directory, and the database. The wp-content directory contains the plugins, files uploaded on the site, or whatever that is specific to your site. So later if you would like to use wp-content and the database on a new WP installation, you may have to update some modules or functions used in themes.

That said, it sometimes happens that other files in wp-admin or wp-includes are modified. It's really not a good practice but if you don't know what has been done on the WP, you better have to backup all the directories.