Moving wordpress site to a new address

Suppose you've built a wordpress website on www.abc.com/one, now you want to move it to one.abc.com --

Step 1. Create your subdomain and folder on your server. You don't want to destroy your original wordpress folder,  so you should use a different name, or alternatively you may rename the old folder before creating a new folder/subdomain.

Step 2. Move all files under the old folder to the new one. Be attention not to move the folder but the files under it, since you want to use one.abc.com as your root folder.

Step 3. If you're using a different database for the new location, make sure that the database is accessible. Check the configuration in "wp-config.php" to get your database name and password.



Step 4. Now you can see the website running on the new address, with all stylesheets and images still missing. To fix the problem, enter phpmyadmin or any other MySQL GUI tool to update the site url info in the database. By default you may find it in the table "wp_options".

Step 5. Now the homepage should be functioning correctly, but the dynamic page links are broken. To fix this, login the dashboard, enter "settings", and correct both "WordPress Address (URL)" and "Site Address (URL)".

Step 6. Now you've successfully moved your wordpress site! If you didn't use relative location for the links on your posts/pages, theses links may be broken after the moving work. The quickest way to fix all the links is to execute a line of SQL:

wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, "http://www.abc.com/one/","/");

wp_posts is the table name, while post_content is the field name. The names vary depending on how you set them up. "http://www.abc.com/one/" is your old address. In this case, we're going to use a subdomain, so I replace all the matching strings with a relative location "/", which means "root".

If you're just moving it to another folder under the domain, the command should be like:

wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, "http://www.abc.com/one/","/two/");