How to migrate a local flywheel site to live website hosting account

Workflow
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Nikoletta,

That isn’t a dumb question at all. I had the same question too. Here is what I’ve done for my site that is developed on Local and hosted on 1&1. This process assumes that the production site already has the same version of WordPress installed.

  1. Install the plug-in “All-in-One WP Migration” to your Local site and your production site.
  2. Install the plug-in “Force Generate Thumbnails” to your Local site.
  3. Create an export file using the “All-in-One Migration” plug-in.
    3a. Add a rule to ‘Find’ your development site name (e.g. yoursitename.dev) and ‘Replace’ with your production site name (e.g. yoursitename.com).
    3b. [Optional] Add a rule to ‘Find’ your development site database prefix and ‘Replace’ with your production site database prefix. This is only needed if the two are different.
    3c. Export to “File”, which is free with the plug-in.
    3d. Download the file that is created to your Desktop or Downloads folder.
  4. On your production site perform an import using the "All-in-One Migration’ plug-in. In the dialog box that opens just drag and drop your exported file from step 3d or navigate to the exported file location.
    4a. Wait patiently while the file uploads.
    4b. Apply the uploaded export file to the production site when prompted to do so.
  5. Verify the installation.
    5a. Look at the list of plug-ins and re-activate plug-ins that need activation. Typically these are ones that have a license key, and/or where the license key is difference on development than on production.
    5b. Check out your media library. If there are no thumbnails then use the plug-in Tools -> “Force Regenerate Thumbnails” to (duh) force the regeneration of thumbnails in the media library.
  6. Check out your pages and/or posts and/or comments. It should all match up with development now.

I’ve performed this process up and down now several times to perfect it. I experimented with other plug-ins and only had good results using the “All-in-One Migration” tool. My site, silverlakedevelopment.com, is a multilingual web site and only “All-in-One Migration” kept the translated pages intact and associated with the parent page.

Hopefully this is helpful to you and to any others using the excellent Local by Flywheel too.

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