How to move a WordPress site from a staging domain to a live one in Plesk

Note: This is an advanced guide and may take 1hr+ to complete. Please note that if the steps are followed incorrectly and the site fails to load, our support team will not be able to investigate or fix any development problems. If required, we could perform a manual migration to carry out these steps on your behalf. You can find more information in this guide.

The information in this guide is provided as a suggestion, and we can't provide detailed support for modifications to a Content Management System. If you require assistance with this, we'd recommend speaking to your website developer to ensure relevance and compatibility with your site.

Assumptions:

• You have a live site like 'yourdomain.net.au', currently loading out of your httpdocs directory.
• You have a staging site, currently loading out of a subdomain like 'dev.yourdomain.net.au' or a subfolder 'yourdomain.net.au/test'.
• The DNS for your site is pointing to our server.

Step 1 - Log into your Plesk Account and navigate to the Wordpress tab.




Step 2 - On the Wordpress Toolkit tab for the development site, select Copy Data.





Step 3 - Fill out the options as below. Note that these options assume you would like to completely replace the old site with the staging site, only keeping the existing users.

Location: Select the primary domain for the Target.
Data to Copy: Select "Files and Database" unless your developer advises otherwise.
Database Tables: Select the default option unless your developer advises otherwise.
Restore: Restore points shouldn't be necessary, but there's no reason to not take them. The backup files are stored in your File Manager, in ".wp-toolkit/snapshots".





Step 4 - Select Close.





Step 5 - Visit your primary site and confirm that the page loads as expected. You may have to hit the 'Refresh' button in the Wordpress toolkit before it shows the new site on the Plesk management area.





If you find that the site has not been brought across correctly, we'd recommend restoring the site from a backup and then contacting your developer for further assistance with the migration.